For many years, our Certified Scrum Product Owner students have asked why the Scrum Alliance does not offer an assessment for students completing their CSPO courses. This post explains why there is no exam today and the steps we took to create an exam that students can use to assess their knowledge.
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a fundamental programming skill in short supply today. TDD is a powerful design technique that improves the quality and reliability of software as unit tests are automated and run more frequently. One of the key concepts behind TDD is that the software become self-checking. As more people touch ...
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Agile transformation often requires Business Analysts to become Product Owners. This essay explores the differences in the two roles and provides two frameworks you can use to make the transition.
Business leaders want a fast way to retrain and upskill their product managers so they have a common approach and philosophy for their specific business. We provide a rundown of the pros and cons of existing options, and give you our own distinctive program which meets those goals, and more.
There are many different types of Product Owners in the world, so let us examine the common ways I have seen Product Ownership implemented in the wild from the most powerful to the least powerful. God (or Goddess) of the Product: this is the most powerful of all the Product ...
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Writing specific, observable and repeatable Action Items with clear owners is an important skill for Product Owner and ScrumMasters to master (see my last post on why I feel this way). In Online Education at Applied Frameworks, we will give you plenty of opportunities to put this skill into practice as you ...
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Retrospectives without concrete action items are pretty much a complete waste of time (and this coming from a guy who thinks the Retrospective is the MOST important discussion in Scrum!!). Over-and-over again, when I encounter teams and organizations struggling to adopt Scrum and Agile, I often find lame, uninspiring Action ...
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While the human mind has an amazing capacity for creative thought and sheer computational power, it has some annoying misfires that can get in the way of building really great products. These misfires, sometimes referred to as cognitive biases, were first identified by Daniel Kanheman and Amos Tversky in the ...
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The Product Owner on my team is also a developer on the team. Do you have any advice on using Scrum in such a scenario? SHORT ANSWER: Yeah - stop doing it! LONG ANSWER: In a healthy Scrum Team, each person fills only one Scrum role at a time. Having someone ...
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How do you cope with the weak Product Owner? You don't - find a new Product Owner (PO) or stop using Scrum. Scrum is based on the idea that an empowered, knowledgable business leader is setting direction for the product (or service) under development. When that person does not exist, ...
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