Lean and focused. Thirteen pages long. To be released this fall.
Migration and Clarity
Massachusetts, my home, has experienced progressively warmer winters. One consequence is that many birds that used to migrate through Massachusetts now stop in Massachusetts for the winter. The result is birds everywhere. Ben, a farmer in the middle of Massachusetts, had been plagued by an overwhelming number of ducks, geese, and other migratory birds. They … Continue reading
Mildred the Goose
Overview: Agile processes are easy to grasp after you’ve been on a project that employs them. Until then, many have trouble understanding what an agile process or an agile project is all about. Whereas traditional project management approaches can offer analogies to traditional,production-line manufacturing, agile processes often use analogies to complexity theory, a slippery subject … Continue reading
Muck the Duck
These are the jokes I told in my Scrum Master classes. Brick-Laying Duck New buildings were going up all over town. The best were made from brick. And, as you would expect, bars were always nearby to salve the pains of the working folk In one of the bars, one of the brick layers always … Continue reading
Look at Capability, not Title.
Development team or Delivery team. Continue reading
Scrum is simple, just use it as is!!
Scrum is a mindset, an approach to turning complex, chaotic problems into something that can be used. Jeff Sutherland and I based it on these pillars: Small, self-organizing, self-managing teams; Lean principles; and, Empiricism, using frequent inspection and adaptation to guide the work of the teams to the most successful outcome possible. The Scrum Guide … Continue reading
Scrum Improvements
The circumstances where Scrum is used are diverse. When people get Scrum to work well for them, they have had to make it fit their situation. They often feel that was a shortcoming of Scrum, and if we only “updated” Scrum to include their addendum, everyone would benefit. Product backlog refinement has been a frequently … Continue reading
Scrum @ 21
Scrum at 21 – A Look Back Through the Eyes of Ken Schwaber, its co-creator I’m told that it has been 21 years since Scrum became public when Jeff Sutherland and I presented it at an Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) workshop in Austin, TX in October of 1995. Time sure does fly. Things … Continue reading
Multiple increment delivery within a Sprint
Question: I recently had the following exchange that may be fill in some gaps in understanding how to use Scrum. “You have been quoted in PSM classes as saying: “A Scrum project is only one Sprint long. A release of software may be the sum of multiple increments (and previously developed software, if any), or there … Continue reading
Building an Agile Organization Part 3
Remember the angry development VP from Part 1. He had hired a certified Scrum Master and found him inadequate. This VP made the assumption that the CSM certification meant the person was qualified to help his organization. He found out it only meant the person was certified as having attended a Scrum Alliance scrum … Continue reading
Ken Schwaber's Blog: Telling It Like It Is 