|
The long awaited videos from South Africa’s first Scrum Day are now finally available. We have created a channel on Vimeo which you can find here. Should you have any other questions, please email scrumday@scrum.org.za
|
Popularity: 37% [?]
Tobias Mayer is perhaps one of the more influential scrum trainers. (He’s definitely one of the most provocative.) His blog, “Agile Anarchy” has a new post about the importance of the scrum board to the scrum process as a whole.
I wanted to jump up and down when I read it. It speaks to me about why I hate the whole idea of an electronic board.
He also links to Xavier Quesada Allue’s blog, which echoes this practical approach to scrum and teams. I absolutely love his “Elements of taskboard design” which has real practical tips on what you can do to make your task board more effective. And he made me aware of “Super Sticky Post It’s“.
Now I’m off to convince Loren, Mistress of Stationery, to order us some of those. Sometimes the best tools are already out there.
Scrum(tm) - a 3M product
Popularity: 35% [?]
After a hiatus, here are some scrum links for you to expand your knowledge and hone your craft.
I found Jeff Patton’s ‘Story Map‘ to be a useful discussion on an alternative to the 1-dimensional product backlog. 
It was also the basis of one of the Open Spaces sessions at the recent Orlando gathering. This is definitely not a vanilla scrum technique, so not suggested for beginners. Jeff’s presentation explicitly states he believes it to be a ‘Ha’ technique (in the Shu-Ha-Ri schema).
One for the scrum masters among the readers: the Scrum Alliance has a run down of a discussion on the ‘Top 10 Organisational Impediments‘. Which will also give you a chance to check out the zooty new Scrum Alliance website. There is lots of content from the Orlando Gathering there as well.
The hot topic at the moment in the scrum community is all about the role of certification and testing. ’s view of the beta test can be found here. I’d be curious to hear in the comments what people’s view of the test are.
Till next time
Popularity: 4% [?]
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.
Popularity: 4% [?]
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.
Popularity: 4% [?]
