How many members did the best Scrum teams you worked with have? It’s an age-old question amongst practitioners who are new to Agile methodologies: “What is the optimal number of members in a team?”.

The Scrum Guide suggests that a team “should be small enough to remain nimble and large enough to complete significant work within a Sprint, typically 10 or fewer people”. But it doesn’t provide any evidence for this.

Fortunately, this is a question that can be answered with data. So we scoured scientific studies on team size and also performed analyses on data from ~2.000 Agile teams to determine the optimal team size. We report the findings and their implications.

Read the full post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/5-effective-ways-to-increase-management-support-for-agile-4dccf57bf5e6

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

In our workshops and classes, participants often lament how difficult it is to get “management to do their part”. And my experience in this area has also been one of many struggles. Some managers get Agile and Scrum. But others seem to have made a hobby out of making things as hard as possible.

Many scientific studies have also emphasized “management support” as one of the most critical, or even the most critical, factors to successful Agility. So what can do we as Agilists other than complain or resort to "us vs them"-thinking?

This episode is aimed at helping Scrum and Agile teams who are struggling to get support from management. Our focus is on the simple things you can do, in almost any environment.

Read the full post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/5-effective-ways-to-increase-management-support-for-agile-4dccf57bf5e6

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

The mere mention of SAFe® often results in groans among Agilists. It isn't hard to find skeptical views of SAFe® and similar large-scale Agile frameworks. Honestly, we're not a fan either.

We also believe we need to ground our beliefs in solid evidence as much as we can. So what is the actual evidence that SAFe® doesn't work or is outright harmful to organizations and teams?

In this episode, we explore the results of several scientific studies and reviews that have attempted to compare scaling approaches. We also report findings from our academic analyses based on data from ~2.000 Agile teams. And the results are ... not what you'd expect. We discuss the implications of the findings in detail and hope it lays the foundation for better conversations around scaling in and around organizations.

Read the full post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-is-safe-really-that-bad-ed5c5c706e42

Our peer-reviewer paper on the comparison of scaling methods
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571849

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

How can we make pair programming more effective? We know that some developers love it, and others hate it.

Pair programming is a common practice in Agile teams. As we reported in our previous episode, the scientific evidence from meta-analyses overwhelmingly shows that pair programming is beneficial for quality and learning, especially for junior and intermediate developers, and particularly for complex tasks.

Several academic investigations have attempted to shine a light on this from different angles. We discuss the impact of personality traits, task complexity, experience, and communication patterns. We also offer a lot of practical evidence-based recommendations.

Read the post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-to-make-pair-programming-more-effective-a47e287cace7

Listen to the previous episode (#97):
https://www.buzzsprout.com/466339/14495424

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

We are fans of pair programming. There is something very satisfying about passing the keyboard back and forth and sharing the mind space for a problem with someone else. But other developers hate it for various reasons. Some find it wasteful. Others wonder if the quality isn't just the same, or even worse, than solo developers.

We believe we should ground our opinions in evidence as much as possible. So what does scientific research have to say about pair programming? In this episode, we explore the insights from over 25 academic studies that investigated pair programming. The insights may support your beliefs or challenge them - let's find out!

Read the post:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-the-costs-and-benefits-of-pair-programming-b4b54b27c6ff

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

Scrum is great. We love it. And it's also just a recipe. It needs a lot more to result in a flavorful, delicious, and nutritious meal.

Understanding Scrum as merely a recipe has worked well for us to understand both its strengths and limitations. Its a useful metaphor to help others understand what to expect from Scrum and what other ingredients are needed to make it all work.

Read the post:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/scrum-is-just-a-recipe-739665ae70db

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

How does working from home influence teamwork? This question came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Most companies switched from fully co-located work to fully remote work for most of the pandemic. But since then, many of those policies have been reverted under the assumption that working from home negatively impacts performance, productivity, and teamwork.

In this episode, we bring a scientific perspective to this question. We review the current scientific evidence around how working from home affects employees and teams and offer practical recommendations. This episode is relevant to both Agile teams and other kinds of teams.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-does-working-from-home-influence-teamwork-6a14b4c804a

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

Have you ever noticed the many parallels between organized religion and Scrum? Or with Agile methodologies more broadly? It's been a recurring joke between us as we attend conferences, interact with critics and advocates of Scrum, and follow the comings and goings in our profession. Some of these parallels are merely funny to point out, whereas others are a bit more concerning.

So for this episode, I invite you to imagine that you’re future archeologists who uncover the traces of our Agile community many thousands of years into the future. How would they understand it? What would it look like to them? And please allow me some exaggeration, as there is a purpose to it that you will discover at the end of the episode.

Read the post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/the-church-of-scrum-16e14244b6bc

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

"Agile is dead" is a contrarian opinion that gets thrown around a lot on social media. While it's a nice way to get attention, what does the evidence say? Agile can only be dead if it doesn't work, if it doesn't result in more effective teams and more satisfied customers.

In this episode, we take an evidence-based perspective. We explore the business case for Agile from three perspectives: stakeholder satisfaction, team morale and overall business outcomes. We report results from our own analyses as well as several scientific studies. We'll let the evidence speak for itself.

Read the post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-the-evidence-based-business-case-for-agile-60f38de3a6d2

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

“How do I prevent my high-performing team from burning out?” is a question that recently came up in a community meetup. It's an intriguing question because it starts from a positive situation. If you’ve ever been part of a high-performing team, you know how exhilarating it can be. But paradoxically, it's also a place where people for people to lose themselves in their work together and collapse under the strain — as I did.

In this episode, we apply an evidence-based perspective to this question. What do we know from scientific research about high-performing teams and how they can burn people out? What can do to prevent that, or at least diminish the chance of it happening?

Read the post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-to-prevent-high-performing-teams-from-burning-out-409aa9896caa

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.