Learn how to pinpoint your team’s problems using the two weeks long experiment. — This is a description of the experiment from the story “How the COVID outbreak accidentally kickstarted SCRUM in our IT department”. While I was aware that the experiments like “one day sprint” exists, I had never witnessed it myself before this spring. That is when I found out how powerful…

This is a story. If you are interested in a step-by-step manual to reproduce the focused sprint experiment, head to my other article. I am quite biased against all types of SCRUM simulations. …

Ditch that boring meeting! The closer look on some common anti-patterns of the backlog refinement based on my observations. — I have observed this pattern in several SCRUM teams. In all team member’s calendars, somewhere in the second half of the sprint, there is a big solid block. Usually, it’s a one or two-hour-long meeting called “Backlog refinement”, “Backlog grooming” or something like that.