Scrum Development Kit

On Tuesday, Jeff Sutherland and I will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Scrum’s first public appearance. Those twenty years were my warm up for the next twenty, when I will focus on improving our professionalism. Specifically, I will be done when all Scrum teams deliver “done”, potentially shippable, in operations and usable, increments of … Continue reading →

Scale Scrum Development, not Technical Debt

Creating software with Scrum is difficult. Creating one integrated piece of software with multiple Scrum teams is a managerial and technical drama, requiring sophisticated techniques, tools, and collaboration. In my last two blogs, I shared my opinions about the skills and knowledge to scale Scrum. I could be wrong, but in my experience many people … Continue reading →

Scrum Scaled for Large Projects and Organizational Initiatives

Jeff Sutherland and I have helped hundreds of organizations scale their projects, enable their entire product development, and thread Scrum through their organizations. For sure, none of them were easy, and each had its own unique challenges. Each had its own structure, culture, goals and strategies, challenges, current practices and infrastructure, domains of competence, existing … Continue reading →

Can Software Developers Meet the Need?

Marc Andreessen provided some insights into the importance of software and the software profession’s ability to meet the need at “Why Software Is Eating The World” , http://goo.gl/ob2Cvx Scrum facilitates control through frequent, regular inspection and adaptation of transparent software functionality. Transparency means the software is ready. It can either be immediately deployed or built … Continue reading →

Evidence of Software’s Value to an Organization

The following material is excerpted from what I’ll be presenting Wednesday at the ALM Forum in (wet) Seattle. It contains the foundational ideas for software’s contribution to organizational value Only the outcomes that unambiguously measure value have been selected as direct evidence for Evidence-Based Management of Software Organizations (EBM). Many other contenders were discarded either … Continue reading →

unSAFe at any speed

The boys from RUP (Rational Unified Process) are back. Building on the profound failure of RUP, they are now pushing the Scaled Agile Framework (e) as a simple, one-size fits all approach to the agile organization. They have made their approach even more complicated by partnering with Rally, a tools vendor. Consultants are available to … 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 →

Happy Holidays

Jeff Sutherland and I were thinking about what we could give to the Scrum community this holiday season. It occurred to us that a recurring question posed to us is, “How do I sell Scrum to management?” To help everyone with this issue, Jeff Sutherland and I have written a book, “Software in Thirty Days.” … Continue reading →

Happy New Year

Another year has passed. As an industry, we’ve done better. Our customers are more satisfied. One industry source reports that projects using agile practices are three times more successful than traditional, waterfall projects*. Success was defined as delivering all of the planned functionality on the planned date for the planned cost. Much of the success … Continue reading →