Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, and Acceptance Criteria
The following ideas are not all an official part of Scrum, but they are often used in conjunction with it as complementary techniques. Francis and I don’t use them in our Home Sc
Digital Home Scrum board options (if you have to)
As I say in this post, I would definitely encourage you to use a physical Scrum board. However, there are situations where a digital Scrum board will be the only feasible option, e
Extra ideas for gamifying your Home Scrum system
There are many ways of expanding on the basic Scrum framework, and in this post I have put together a bunch of suggestions for extra things Francis and I have used that have helped
What Kanban is and how we’ve used elements of it in Home Scrum
Kanban’s similar-but-different approach Kanban is a similar system to Scrum that is meant to help visualise your workflow and improve it based on empirical feedback from reality.
Ways of using your Home Scrum system on the move
A physical task board for your Home Scrum system is the best option. Despite all the ways that using a physical board has its advantages, there is one quite obvious downside: what
Beware scope creep
When thinking of tasks or projects or goals, it is useful to think about scope. The scope of a task or project means almost the same as its size, but with a bit more subtlety, beca
How to plan (and how to make planning less overwhelming)
The purpose of planning I used to think that the point of planning out my time was to fit more into my days. By cleverly combining certain errands into one trip, squeezing tasks in
Your requirements (for life) are dumb: how to tell if you’re on the right track
We receive many cultural messages throughout life, and one of these, at least in the West, is ‘be productive’. It’s a loud enough message that it can seem like an
Aim Low, Do Less, Go Easy: how to be kind to yourself
How do we scour the scourge of perfectionism from our minds? Well, to do that, we need to be asking how to be kind to yourself. Remember, productivity isn’t the be-all and end-al
Procrastination: listen to your own cry for help
I’ve been meaning to sit down and finish this post for the last two weeks or so. I am finally doing it now because my friend Alex has offered to act as an accountability aid by s
Perfectionism: the destroyer of worlds
Do you plan too much? Are you always trying to optimise every part of your life but struggling to get any of it done? There is an old Italian proverb: “Le meglio è l’inimi
On giving up and letting go
Letting go The next few posts took me a while, because I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say, or how to say it without repeating myself over and over again. Eventually I realise
Things you don’t think of as work that are actually work
What counts as work? Here’s an incomplete list of different types of work: Working for money (a job) School work (or learning in general) Housework Child care Other care (e.g. fo
Iteration: inspect, adapt, play
The importance of iteration in Scrum cannot be overemphasised. But why do we put such weight on the idea of repeating stuff? Be empirical One major reason why Scrum is more effecti
Ideas for your Home Scrum retrospective
The Sprint Retrospective, as the name suggests, is a chance to retrospectively reflect on the last sprint as a team and consider how it went. As the Scrum guide says, it is for the
Different flavours of Daily Scrum
The main purpose of your Daily Scrum is to meet as a whole team in front of your Scrum board and share your progress and obstacles, ideally towards your Sprint Goal. It is time-box
Times we’ve stopped doing Home Scrum for a while
There have been several times when Francis and I have stopped doing the Daily Scrum (or any Scrum events) for a few months at a time. The first was after (and during) a month-long
How to do the Home Scrum events
What are the Scrum events? In Scrum, we avoid the term ‘meeting’ because even inside the corporate world, it has too many negative connotations. They used to be called ‘cerem
Sprints and Sprint Goals
What is a sprint? As stated in the introductory post, a sprint refers to the time-cycle in Scrum at the end of which you have your Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and Sprint Pl