Hiring a Scrum Master is one of those things that doesn't happen often, especially when you compare it to how often you hire an engineer to fill a role in your agile team.  Like anything in life, practice helps refine your skills.  If you haven't had the opportunity to hire bunches of Scrum Masters (and therefore refine your process of doing so), this episode will help you sharpen up quickly.

What tips/tricks do you have for hiring a Scrum Master?

Episode 90 set the stage for our "return to basics" approach.  The first step of that approach requires us to start at the beginning.  Over six years ago, we opened our podcast with what we believed to be the most important piece of agile, Trust.  Today, we revisit that topic with a combined 12 years of new ideas, theories, failures, and thoughts.

How has your definition of trust evolved over the past 6 years?  Let's discuss!

A big thanks goes out to our listeners that have either been with us from the beginning or those that went all the way back to episode #1 and binge-listened until they were caught up. We know not everyone has done that, so we are introducing a plan to revisit some of the basics. 

In this episode, we tee up that renewed focus on the basics.  We've learned a lot since we started podcasting six years ago and plan to share those learnings.  Our agile lives evolved in the past 90 episodes, so we feel it is time to share our evolution with you.

If there are any past episodes you'd like to hear us tackle again, please add a comment below!

In our last episode we discussed how to lead an organization into the world of agile.  Now we tackle supporting your agile adoption by coaching upwards (AKA into your leadership team).  There are countless resources for coaching agile teams, scrum masters, etc., but how do you coach an executive that is unknowingly squashing your adoption's success?  How do you ensure that the entire organization, including executives, understand what it means to be "agile"?  We are here to help!

So much talking, writing, debating, etc. is done around how to operate an agile team.  What about the rest of the organization?  If you are a leader, how does agile affect you and your daily efforts?  Bob and Josh dig into the approaches they use as agile leaders in hopes of answering these questions.

Josh introduces what The Dude team calls "The Agile Donut" to Bob.  This new model (some might even call it a framework) combines multiple agile approaches into a successful, unique recipe for scaling agile.  Learn how Josh and team applied portions of Lean, Scrum, Spotify, SaFE, and others into what we refer to as "The Agile Donut".

What are your thoughts on our new approach?  What parts would work for you?  Everyone at The Dude is dying to see it in action elsewhere, so let us know what you discover!

Like the word "agile", the "microservices" buzzword gets thrown around a lot.  Just like agile again, it often gets used by folks who don't fully understand what it means.  In fact, you may already have an executive coming to you saying "we need microservices!".  

Learn what microservices are and how they affect/support/challenge many of your existing, basic agile and software engineering principles and practices.  Josh walks you through the Dude's evolution of their microservices approach and provides some insight into future evolutions in this area.

How are microservices used in your organization? Let's discuss!

Every band of superheroes has an origin story.  Learn how our dynamic duo of Bob and Josh came together.  This episode covers how we met, the struggles we worked through while helping Teradata adopt agile, and the start of the friendship that launched this podcast.

Bob and Josh tackle a listener request centered around how far/hard should a Scrum Master push the team when they aren't fully bought in to the agile process.  We share our experience in situations like this and offer a few suggestions to try out.

We also introduce Dude Solutions' Tech day in this episode.  This one day conference offers attendees an opportunity to see many of the podcast's episode topics put into action.  Seats are limited so sign up early! 

It is bowl season here in the US, so we decided to explore how closely related the game of football and all of its preparation are related to traditional agile/scrum ceremonies.  We think you'll be surprised to hear how closely they align...

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• What other parallels do you see?  
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• Are there other sports that more closely align to agile and its ceremonies?  
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