The Liberators Podcast The Liberators

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 com...

"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 analy...

“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 questio...

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 "Transactions on Software Engineering". This episode provides a non-technical overview of our investigation,...

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-performing. And while those roots are strong, they are also mostly invisible and unknown to practitioners.I...

“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 creates a clear connection with something else that good Agile teams spend a lot of time on: refi...