Greed and Control Can Ruin an Industry and Movement

It has come to my attention that Scrum Alliance is trying to register a trademark on, “SCRUM USER GROUP,” at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  Word on the street is that that the Trademark Office has indicated that it will publish this trademark shortly for opposition.  If no one opposes, I understand that the … Continue reading →

Do you know how to scale Scrum?

Find out with a short test? A single instance of Scrum has one Scrum Team that works from one Product Backlog. The team sprints against the selected Product Backlog items and creates an increment of potentially shippable, or usable, functionality by the end of the Sprint If you want to test your knowledge of scaling … Continue reading →

Agile Fad?

At a recent conference, one speaker stated that the days of the agile movement are just about over. He said that the software industry has new fads every ten years, and agile was over ten years old. The Agile Manifesto was written to express shared values of people who saw a new way of developing … Continue reading →

Agile, ALM, and Agile 2.0 — Putting the Cart Before the Horse???

Imagine my surprise when Agile 2.0 was “announced” at the recent EclipseCon 2013 in Boston. Here I am thinking the simple tenets so clearly outlined in the The Agile Manifesto of 2001 have yet to be fulfilled by most software organizations more than a decade later. Sure, some organizations may comply in form, but not … Continue reading →

Scrum and Continuous Improvement

Organizations usually don’t adopt Scrum because they like its name. Instead, they have heard that software development is better if they use Scrum – quicker, cheaper, higher quality, more satisfied customers and employees. Sometimes things are so bad in software development that they try Scrum just because it wasn’t what they were doing before. However, … Continue reading →

What Comes After Scrum?

Scrum is not the be-all and end-all process for software and product development. As many of you have noticed, it is barely a process, only a framework. You have to provide all the development, management, product management, and people practices. So, what does Scrum provide? It provides a labeled- environment within which complex development can … Continue reading →