Have you ever had one of those days when you wondered if your ScrumMaster was on crack? Or maybe you’re the ScrumMaster and the you wonder why you are doing what you’re doing! I think we’ve all been there, so this post is for when you are having one of those days. A little bit of humor to brighten things up (while also being somewhat serious at the same time).

Bill Engvall is one of my favorite comedians. The guy just cracks me up every time I watch or listen to him. His most famous line is “Here’s your sign.” So here are a few “sign” stories for you to ponder.

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Have you ever been in a flamethrower war? I sincerely hope you have never been in one like the picture, but if you have been there serving for the US armed forces, then thank you for what you did for our country! Most of us have not been in a literal flamethrower war, but some of us have been in our share of them in the virtual world. I may be showing my age, but we used to have a phrase for arguments on message boards: flame wars or flaming. They were all the rage when a social network was really a Usenet newsgroup. Now we’ve grown up to using fancy mailing lists from Google and Yahoo and we still have the same core issues around disagreements. People will make statements in a message that they would never make in a face-to-face environment.

There were arguments about agile even before the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was created in 2001 by 17 brave individuals (some of whom I’m honored to be able to call friends). Lately, I’ve come to realize that the world of arguing around agile hasn’t changed in the past 10+ years at all. The players have changed, but not the fact that we can’t all get along. In the past year I’ve seen “discuss-ments” (give me credit if you use my made up word!) around all of the following issues: [click to continue…]

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As a ScrumMaster silence can be golden!

December 19, 2011

I love it when someone who was in one of my workshops sends me a message saying something from the workshop worked well for them. Recently I have started telling people in my Certified ScrumMaster training workshops that far too many ScrumMasters talk too much. I tell them they need to learn a new skill – [...]

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An Agile Merry Christmas 2010!

December 24, 2010

Are you feeling the Christmas spirit yet?  I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, so if that isn’t the holiday for you, think about your equivalent, or just think about going to your personal happy place.  Are you feeling it yet?  I know I’m in the Christmas spirit.  I can see it in the eyes of [...]

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Overdue Agile and Scrum Thanks

November 23, 2010

Last year around this time I wrote a blog entry “New to agile? Give thanks!”  That was written from the perspective of an agile team member.  This year I want to get a little more personal and give thanks to the people who have helped me get to where I am today in the Agile [...]

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In defense of the Scrum Alliance

October 21, 2010

Have you ever felt really let down by someone you respect?  I guess the way the world is today we can all cite a long list of people that are famous and respected who let us down (as a golfer, the picture to the left is one that comes to mind for me) so maybe [...]

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Your Agile isn’t my Agile!

August 23, 2010

Have you ever had the feeling someone REALLY didn’t get it?  I had that feeling recently when reading this article about the supposed weaknesses of agile.  Some of the 10 points make a bit of sense, but what seems to be missing is what happens in a non-agile scenario with the same limitations?  I decided [...]

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New to agile? Remember, sometimes things get crazy!

July 27, 2010

Do you ever get so frustrated you feel like pulling your hair out?  I do (although that is NOT a picture of me to the left!).  If you look at my pictures you will see that it would be difficult for me to pull my hair out because a) there isn’t a lot of it, [...]

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New to agile? Learn how to fail well

June 14, 2010

Is success or failure really a choice?  I don’t think it is at all.  Pretty much no one chooses to fail.  Unfortunately, we can’t just choose to be successful either.  What we CAN choose is to try to make a success out of a failure!  The old saying “Make lemonade out of lemons” really is [...]

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Agile antipattern: Target fixation

May 18, 2010

Have you ever been so focused on something that the rest of the world seemed to disappear for a while?  This can be great under certain circumstances, but in other cases it can be extremely harmful.  When someone focuses on a target and doesn’t see anything but the target we call it “target fixation.”  This [...]

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I’m a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) – so what?

May 17, 2010

This is a companion post to last year’s “I’m a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) – so what?” post.  In that post I spoke about the advantage of using Certified Scrum Coaches over non-certified coaches for agile or Scrum training.  I also wrote a post called “Agile Ponderings: Certification – useful or not?” where I explored [...]

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Agile antipattern: Sizing or estimating bug fixes

May 5, 2010

Is the bug to the left a large bug or a small bug?  It looks HUGE to me!  Well, in reality it is probably between .5 and .75 inches long.  Not really a very big bug at all.  Why do we care? Because trying to size the fixing of software “bugs” is at least as hard [...]

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New to agile? Remember a user story is more than a card!

May 3, 2010

What’s wrong with the user story on the card?  It seems to have everything we need: a) short title, b) a size (in this case 2), and c) a well-written story using the standard “As a … I want … so that …” format.  So what’s wrong? Nothing!  Well, almost nothing.  The user story card [...]

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What style of agile training works best?

April 7, 2010

Have you ever been in a class or training session which is so boring you felt like you might fall asleep?  Or maybe you are one of the people that DID fall asleep!  I know I’ve been there many times.  When I started facilitating sessions on agile and Scrum I knew I couldn’t do it [...]

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If you had been me at the Orlando Scrum Gathering…

March 15, 2010

you would have had an absolutely indescribably fantastic time!  And that’s just for starters.  To be honest, the phrase “that was so much fun it must have been a sin” comes to mind.  I had fun every minute I was there.  Here’s a short VERY LONG recap of what I can recall now (a week [...]

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My Orlando Scrum Gathering Presentation

March 14, 2010

I’m making my Orlando Scrum Gathering presentation “Doing Scrum Isn’t the Same as LIVING Scrum” available as a PDF.  You don’t have to fill out a form to get it, although if you sign up for my mailing list and/or subscribe to the blog I won’t complain!  Just click the link below to download. Doing [...]

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Orlando Scrum Gathering – I’m going to be a doctor soon!

March 9, 2010

In about 5 minutes I’m going to play the role of being a “doctor” at the Scrum Clinic which is part of the Orlando Scrum Gathering.  It’s an interesting concept.  A doctor and a patient meet to discuss a topic important to the patient.  In my case the patient wants to talk about the Scrum [...]

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New to agile? Watch an Intro to Scrum video in about 8 minutes

March 3, 2010

My friend, Arif Gangji, and I created this video to help his customers understand why his company uses Scrum as their software development framework. I decided I really liked the video, so I’m posting it here as well. It isn’t perfect, but it is plenty good enough to get across the basic ideas of Scrum. Over [...]

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Finally back online and going full speed ahead

March 1, 2010

Have you ever had a computer meltdown?  OK, so myIT infrastructure meltdown wasn’t as total as the picture to the left, but it still was pretty bad.  In the span of a couple of days I had my main desktop and my main laptop both die.  This happened just before I had several straight weeks [...]

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The ScrumMaster Diaries: #3 – Becoming a CSM

January 25, 2010

Dear Diary, I completed day 1 of my 2-day Certified ScrumMaster course today and I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed.  I didn’t have any idea there was a prerequisite of reading a particular book.  Luckily not a lot of other people knew about that either so I didn’t look too stupid.  Nothing we covered today [...]

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