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.
