How it started A few years ago, while searching for a meaningful way to act on climate change, I started to wonder: what if I brought a sustainability perspective into my own Agile teams? I delved into the topic of sustainable IT and started with a Planet Retrospective for my Scrum team, working through the Principles of Green Software Engineering. We talked about what steps our team could take to reduce the carbon footprint of...
This past July, I traveled to Dallas to give a talk about “The Planet as a Stakeholder” at the Agile2024 conference, hosted by Agile Alliance. What an experience it was to be at such a large conference and to be able to contribute! Earlier this year, I submitted a proposal for a talk at the Agile2024 conference. As I often submit proposals to conferences, I honestly didn’t expect it to be accepted and had almost...
Climate change. For the past few years I struggled with this topic and with my own role in it. It felt like a far to big problem to have a serious positive impact on, but also a far to big a problem to ignore. Until I realized the following. We as Scrum Masters, Developers, Product Owners, Agile Coaches, we are everywhere! In all the big companies around the globe. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we...
Our environmental challenges Scientists urge us to be climate-neutral by 2050. In order to reach that goal we must cut carbon emissions by at least 55% in 2030. This leaves us with just 7 years to drastically alter our pathway: we will have to cut our carbon emissions at a revolutionary speed. Every IT team needs to turn the lens on itself and ask: ‘how are we impacting the planet, and what can we do...
Background In the past couple of months I dived into the topic of sustainability for scrum teams. Because I, like so many people inside (and outside) of my teams, am looking for ways to help the climate. We started with a Planet Retrospective about Green Software, in which we defined the first steps towards reducing the carbon footprint of our IT landscape. Setting the stage with the Planet Check In But before we started with...
What would we do differently if we treated Planet Earth as our stakeholder? My scrum teams and I are looking for ways to become more sustainable and reduce our IT carbon footprint. Inspired by Jutta Eckstein‘s notion of ‘prioritizing the planet as one of the stakeholders’ we asked ourselves the above question. We delved into the topic of green software engineering to find answers and practical ideas on how to reduce our carbon footprint as...