The Liberators Podcast

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 ev...

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 t...

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...

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 c...

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 p...

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:...

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...

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 ep...

"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 th...

“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 c...

We're back! How diverse is your team? Do you have members from different age groups, different genders, different roles, and different cultural backgrounds? Is that diversity beneficial to team performance, or is it challenging, or both? This was the research question of an academic study we performed with Prof. Daniel Russo. This study has been peer-reviewed and published in the journal &quo...

The first thing people tend to see when they look at the Scrum framework are the roles, the artifacts, and the events. But that is only structure. There is much more going on in Scrum teams that we can understand better from other perspectives. One such perspective is motivation. Scrum is deeply rooted in insights from academic research into what motivates people and teams to become high-performin...

“We consistently observe that teams struggle with continuous improvement. Instead of keeping it small, simple, and practical, teams go for ambitious — but vague and unclear — improvements.” The improvement actions that come out of Sprint Retrospectives and other reflective practices are weak when there is no sense of scope, no sense of timeline, and no sense of who is involved. Interestingly, this...

What makes a good Product Owner? How much time should they spend with their team or with stakeholders? Or writing items for the Product Backlog? Do Product Owners require a full mandate in order to be effective? What strategies make them more - or less - effective? In this episode, we explore scientific research that investigated Product Owners. We also share some of our own research. Read the tra...

"SAFe destroys autonomy", "estimation is a waste of time" and "Scrum Masters can't also be Product Owners" are just a few of the strong claims that are often made in our professional community. But where is the evidence to support these bold claims? We sampled 50 posts with similar bold claims and found that only 3 offered *any* kind of evidence. Two of those wer...

"It slowly started to dawn on me that something else was happening during these gatherings. Something I hadn’t seen before so clearly in my previous work with groups. I saw so many happy faces around me. I saw so many people intently listening to each other as each shared a personal story. And I saw so many people touched by the awareness that others were really listening to them as they shar...

Are Scrum Masters perhaps too focused on the process, and too little on whether or not that process actually delivers valuable outcomes? How is that for you, as a Scrum Master? This is a hunch based on countless conversations we've had with Scrum Masters, including our own practice as a Scrum Master. But what do the facts say? So we read relevant scientific studies and collected data through...

A common belief among Agile practitioners is that Scrum works best in smaller organizations. Things are simpler there, and you don't have all those impediments of your typical corporate. Since much of our day-to-day experience is also with smaller to medium-sized businesses, we are also included to believe this. But is it consistent with the facts? We believe that you should always ground you...

We are creating the Scrum Team Survey to help Scrum teams and Agile teams to diagnose their process. We also give tons of evidence-based feedback. One of the cool things about developing a product ourselves, and with our own money, is that we get to learn (or reaffirm) a lot of valuable lessons about Agile software development. In this episode, we share our 10 biggest lessons. Be prepared for some...

Do your Daily Scrums feel like a pointless ritual where everyone just lists what they’ve done yesterday, and what they do will do today? Does Sprint Planning feel like a waste of time because everyone only wants to know what they have to do? And does your Sprint Review consist of team members listing their individual accomplishments? If so, you are probably dealing with a complete lack of coherenc...

Do you start a new Scrum team by explaining the roles, artifacts, and events? Do you rarely consider how to build coalitions and persuade people in power to support your work with Scrum? Are you thinking about the psychological needs of people and how to motivate them to work with Scrum? You may be engaging in a bit too much blueprint thinking. In this episode, we explore how blue-print thinking i...

Recently, the concept of “fluid teams”, “dynamic reteaming” or “ad-hoc teaming” has gained traction in the Agile community. Although the concept has many different definitions, a characteristic they share is that members move in and out of a team during its lifetime. However, decades of academic research into teams and workgroups have underscored the importance of team stability as a requirement f...

Do high-performing teams communicate more than low-performing teams? 🤔 If you think "Yes!", you may want to reconsider. Scientific studies often find the reverse. When researchers compare high-performing teams with low-performing teams, they consistently find that high-performing teams communicate less. This has been observed with flight crews, nuclear plant control crews, and work team...

Why is code quality so often an issue? Why do software teams — despite their best initial intentions — often end up fighting a codebase that is hard to test, resistant to change, and prone to strange bugs? We have many intuitions about this. But we’ve learned the hard way that my intuitions are often wrong. So in this episode, we explore insights from scientific studies that have investigated tech...

There is a growing trend in our industry to distinguish between “Agility” and “Business Agility”. The idea here is that Agile is limited only to teams and to software and that more is needed. Many consultancy firms are now jumping into that gap with additional frameworks and models. This makes no sense to me. I think that this distinction reveals a glaring misunderstanding of the purpose of Agile....