John Ragozzine

Store-y Points

The Scrum world is replete with creative and delightful symbolic stand-ins meant to help people get good with story pointing.

What vs. Why

Getting to the root cause of an issue can take time. It can even feel inefficient to discuss. But by leaning into techniques such as The Five Whys or Peeling the Onion, we have the opportunity to deliver a more effective and long-lasting positive impact for our teams.

Rejecting Master for Main

We all know that words carry power. A person’s word choice can make or break a conversation, a motto, or even a simple salutation. Seeing GitHub taking action with word choice, I decided to replace the default branch of this website’s repo from master to main.

Velocity in Scrum is a Means, Not an End

Being a scrum master, I often worry if velocity looms too large for me. From project forecasting to sprint planning to team retrospectives, velocity metrics are up in my grill more than bratwurst at a Green Bay Packers tailgate. Even from a “book learnin’” standpoint, velocity is front and center: “The Scrum Master is accountable for the Velocity … of the Team.” That big V Velocity is really intimidating! But does velocity warrant such verbal (and mental) emphasis?

Woman working in a home office, using an iMac

Team Norms for Distributed Scrum Teams

If you’ve suddenly found yourself working remotely due to COVID-19 precautions, how do you handle all the normal day-to-day things like meetings, tracking tasks, and basic communication? Team norms don’t need to be complicated just because everyone’s remote. Being a fully distributed company ourselves, we have learned a lot over the years that helps us keep our teams running smoothly.