Top 10 Blog Posts for 2014

Happy New Year!  Last week, I reviewed the web traffic to get some insight on what visitors were searching for at The Scrum Academy and I produced this top ten blog posts for 2014.  Enjoy!

1. 13 Scrum Case Studies: case studies are always popular and this entry tops the list of top ten posts for the second year in a row.  In addition to the case studies, be sure to read the both parts of our March entry, Nine Ways to Ensure You Succeed with Scrum (part 1 and part 2), to learn what are the essential constraints to a successful Scrum transformation.
2. LeSS – A Framework to Scale Scrum & Agile: another entry from our 2013 top ten list, moves from third place to take the second position in 2014.  I suspect this growth in interests reflects growing desire to understand more about how to support Scrum in larger enterprises.  Read the second part of this article, Why Does Scrum Succeed in Some Places and in Others Fail?, to get the complete story.
3. Scrum Roles Defined: this short entry is always useful as a quick refresher or to share with other people as a reference.  If you have time, take a moment to review to this short article from 2011 about Combining Scrum Roles.
4. Using a Sprint Burndown Chart: Sprint Burndown charts continue to be an important topic for readers in 2014.  My 2013 article, Purpose of a Sprint Backlog, offers deeper thinking on Burndown Charts and I highly recommend it.
5. Why Commitment is Important in Scrum: glad to see readers are still finding one of my personal favorites on making authentic commitments valuable.  I recommend reading this August 2014 entry regarding the Check In and Check Out protocols if you are looking to increase the engagement of your Teams.
6. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time: the first book review to make it into a top ten list.  If you found Jeff Sutherland’s book review interesting, we also had a chance at the end of 2014 to interview Jeff Sutherland for our practitioner series.
7. Introducing Scrum via Buy A Framework: this entry describes how I use the classic Innovation Game, Buy a Feature, to teach people the basic elements of Scrum.  Download the one-page PDF if you want to facilitate this game yourself.
8. Offshore Team with Onshore ScrumMaster – Does it Work?: this provocative article was popular again in 2014.  I recommend taking some time to read this entry (Blow the Place Up!) from my short series on Lean Concepts for Scrum (as well as part 1 and part 2) on why we focus on transforming the business rather than making small changes.
9. Historia de Usuario vs Caso de Uso (y por qué los Casos de Uso son todavía importantes): no one was more surprised than I when a translated article broke the top ten list for 2014.  The original article in English explains the difference between a user story and a use case.
10. Scrum Bill of Rights: this list of Scrum rights is modeled after the Extreme Programming Bill of Rights.  I find it helpful to have a similar list in Scrum to help explain what are the different expectations people should have when participating in a Scrum Team.