8 Lessons Learned from the first Scrum team

Joe Kinsella, one of the developers on the first Scrum team, does a retrospective on his experience.

A few years back I received a call from Stephen Denning, an Australian author best known for his books on organizational storytelling. Stephen wanted to talk with me about my work at Easel Corporation in the 1990s for his upcoming The Leader's Guide to Radical Management. Until Stephen called, I hadn’t thought much about Easel. But his interview brought all the memories of the “first scrum team” back, and with it a recollection of the lessons I took from Easel.

Background
I worked at the Burlington-based Easel Corporation for over four years in the early and mid-1990s, joining the company out of school and leaving it after its acquisition by VMARK. I was a software engineer on the team developing Synchronicity, a suite of software development tools based on our proprietary Smalltalk environment. I like to call this period of time my PhD in object oriented technology. Long before Hibernate, Ruby and Eclipse, we were building a modern development environment that included a dynamic object-oriented programming language, visual programming editors, integrated analysis and design tools, platform independent run time, two way code generation, object to relational persistence framework, local object store, and more. More ...