Scrum User Group

Kicking off with the latest from Jeff Sutherland. Jeff recently gave a talk on ‘Scrum Shock Therapy’. Similar to the approach apparently used in MySpace, Jeff advocates a ‘shock and awe approach’ described in this blog post. It’s kind of a rough change management process and will likely cause some unhappiness. My take is that change is like pulling a band-aid off; best to do it all quickly and get it over with.

Imesh Soni has a good article up at Scrum Alliance, which could probably be called the ’9 Habit of highly Ineffective Scrums’ or something. It describes which tricks are used in traditional waterfall organisations and need to be changed for scrum teams.

From Ukrainian Agile discussion group comes this paper on how to use LEGO(tm) to simulate a scrum. Useful in showing people how the various principles and practices fit together.

For our Product Owners in the audience, Jack Milunsky has a good top 10 list of the things which a PO are supposed to be doing.

From Jeff Atwood (who is apparently a CSM) a really good article about team dynamics and the importance of eliminating the ‘bad apples’. As a scrum master it’s critical that your identify the impediments a team member may be imposing on the team.

For the techies, a good article on how to handle intermittence when using test driven development.

And from Ron Jeffries one on the necessity of refactoring. Ron’s salient point is that if you’re practising agile development your design must evolve. Under those circumstances refactoring is a ‘law of nature’.

Jurgen Appelo has published an excellent scrum presentation that you can find on his blog. Its a really good one for people not that familar with scrum and covers the history, practices and discussion on some of the usual questions.

Lastly, from the ever reliable InfoQ comes a good discussion about the pros and cons of physical information radiators. I love my Big Visible Charts; hiding things in a web application just don’t seem like a good idea, but go read the article to hear from more than one viewpoint.

Till next week.

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Twas a blistering night in Cape Town, and nearly 50 newbies gathered to hear the tale of ‘Scrum’…

Mike Freislich, our MC, kicked off with some feedback on what the user group committee has been up to. If you’re reading this on the new site, then you probably know about some of them already.

We’ve relaunched the website, started adding more dynamic content.

We now have a local scrum discussion group which already has some good discussions going.

There is also the events announcement group, which hopefully people know about, since they were at the event.

The committee is also offering services in the form of sending a scrum evangelist to your company if you would like someone to speak about scrum.

Then into the presentations: I gave what felt like a very hurried presentation about the basics of scrum. Trying to cover all the roles, practices and artifacts as well as some tips and insight on what it takes to implement it into your organisation all in 30 minutes was a challenge. It probably didn’t help that the air conditioning was going full blast (not that it seemed to help much) making it difficult to be heard.

Questions after the presentation focussed on the reasons why scrum implementations tend to fail; Ken scwaber is quoted here as saying approximately 75% of teams attempting to implement scrum, will return to their previous ways of working.

The consensus that seems to emerge is that it is likely due to the necessity for handing over the locus of control from the traditional management structure to the teams who will be doing the work. Many organisations struggle with this and abandon the framework.

A copy of the presentation can be found here. For other (much better) presentations, you can look here and here.

A short break and Chris Tisdall from Allan Grey next spoke about his experiences as a Product Owner, implementing scrum. Some wonderful insights into the challenges of rolling out scrum at an enterprise scale. Chris is passionate about being a Product Owner and it really came through in his presentation. I think he has a lucky team; a Product Owner who gets scrum, has a vision for the product and leads his team.

Some of the questions posed to Chris included ‘What kind of career pathing is done for team members in a scrum organisation’ and ‘How do you handle bonuses and increases for a team in an individualist culture’.

No real answers emerged, so perhaps they’re good topics for future meetings.

We wrapped up and headed for the cold drinks, with lots of interesting discussions after.

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Mike Freislich kicks us off with his first article submission to the link page “Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams” – Henrik Kniberg
Henrik Kniberg has a wealth of good Scrum literature behind him. Part of the strength of his writing style is that he keeps it real and practical by pointing out mistakes that he and his teams have made, and what they did to rectify them. He has written a great article focused on version control across multiple teams which really accentuates the importance of “Done” and what could be involved to practically achieve it. A great article even if only a single team.

I recently found an oldy-but-goody on running stand ups: It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings. This is a case of getting the basics right, and Jason Yip of ThoughtWorks has some really good tips. My favourite; if your team is engaging in the ‘Storytelling’ anti-pattern (or smell), make the person speaking do so while standing on one leg.

Jeff Sutherland talks a bit about how organisational change (like scrum adoption) happens. To add to this point have a look at an older article from Mike Vizdos. It contains the rather startling statistic from Ken Schwaber that about 75% of teams fail to successfully implement scrum.

The core of why that is, can probably be down to the reasons presented in this article from Alistair Cockburn. And if you’re not sure, he has a great top 10 list of how to know if you’re not doing agile.

On a less gloomy note: you can find a myriad of cool scrum games at Tasty Cupcakes.

For those with an interest in the debate about whether Scrum is Lean, Dave West’s slightly sensationalist article can be found here. Be sure to check out the debate in the comments.

And lastly, Tom Perry has an interesting idea; using the 360 degree feedback format as preparation for your sprint retrospective. This does move the discussion in the retrospective from a team-based improvement to more personal one, and should be used with caution.

Till next week.

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We kick off this week’s link fest with sex orgies.

Jurgen Appelo’s post on how scrum uses peer pressure in a positive way can be found here.
I enjoy his writing and he uses a cool technique for creating a scrum team, by getting them to cook dinner for him. I like it ‘cos I worked as a chef for a while and having everyone working together to produce a meal for several people at the same time is a good way to teach people how to self-organise. Plus you get free food out of it

There’s a good article by Clinton Keith here about the factors influencing your sprint length.

Mike Cohn clarified the ‘Release Backlog’ concept and why it really isn’t a good idea. He draws attention to the use of velocity as a predictor of the shipping date.

He has another good article up about story points. Many teams struggle with the move from time based estimates to story points. I think this may help clarify what story points are, given that they are a more abstract measure of effort.

Having to support the software we ship while building new functionality is probably one of the most challenging aspects of implementing scrum. Boris will tell you that the answer is not to write bugs. But if you do, how to handle the support requests while not changing the scope of the sprint or endangering the ability to deliver the commitment? Kelly Walters at ‘All About Agile’ has some good suggestions here.

If you can’t wait till next week for more links, you can also follow me on twitter. Till next week.

Carlo

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For those whose wallets can buck the recession, the upcoming Scrum gathering offers an impressive line-up of speakers. It’s guaranteed to be awesome!

I am particularly encouraged by the range of people and institutions that are engaging with the Scrum Alliance and embracing Scrum…from XP and Crystal to the PMI!

For more information visit http://www.scrumalliance.org/events/19–orlando-scrum-gathering

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