Perfecting Scrum Basics

As we all know, the reason Scrum Teams are kept small is to simplify communication pathways. This allows for communication saturation, which is a cornerstone of cooperation and innovation. It is not an overstatement to say that the entire Scrum development process...

-- Scrum Inc. Staff On July 24th Scrum Inc. is pairing with Joe Justice from Team WIKISPEED fame to broadcast a Webinar on Xtreme Manufacturing. Joe will also be teaming up with Scrum Inc. later in the week when he co-trains a Scrum Master course on the same subject....

Next week Scrum Inc. is broadcasting its monthly Webinar on some of the more costly pitfalls Teams wander into when implementing Scrum. In preparing slides for the presentation, Scrum Inc.’s Chief Product Owner Alex Brown is having some of the staff work through the...

Outsourcing has long been a tool for reducing costs. Scrum changes the economics of outsourcing and helps build a strong business case for keeping development at home. If you can achieve an eighty-fold improvement in velocity with corresponding quality, why would you...

In the early days of what we now know as Agile processes, Mike Beedle was influenced by the online description of Scrum, implemented the process in his own company, and led the effort to drive Scrum through the Pattern Languages of Programming Design conferences. This...

Next weekend the sponsor AngleHack and two student groups at UCLA are throwing a huge hackathon. LAHacks will bring together students and alumni from Southern California’s premier technical schools in hopes of fostering a more cohesive start-up community. It seems...

IROBOT's Genghis Khan now in the Smithsonian I joined Easel Corporation in 1993 as VP of Object Technology after spending 4 years as President of Object Databases, a startup surrounded by the MIT campus in a building which housed some of the first successful AI...

I’ve been reading Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and Kenneth Cukier’s stimulating new book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. The premise of the book is, now that civilization has the tools to both collect and analyze huge amounts data,...

This month, Scrum Inc.’s monthly webinar focuses on fundamentals and correcting bad Scrum habits. While a majority of us feel like we get the basics right, Scrum Inc. surveys and independent polls find that while most Teams understand the basics, many cannot...

There was an interesting radio piece on American Public Media’s Market Place the other day. Host Kai Ryssdal talked with Stephan J. Dubnar of Freakonomics fame about what the latest academic research on feedback tells us.  Here’s how it breaks down: to get people to...

Now in its 47th year, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) is one of the longest-standing continuously running scientific conferences. This conference brings together researchers in an aloha-friendly atmosphere conducive to free exchange of...

The Scrum Master class attendees were off and running on a self-organization exercise. The drill was simple: plan, build, and test as many paper airplanes as you can in 3 minutes. I was busily preparing for the next class module when I gradually became aware of what...

New York Times columnist and author Bruce Feiler has just published a new book titled: The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More.  The secret it turns out is applying agile development to...

By Joel Riddle Scrum is exploding across the industry according to the latest annual State of Agile Survey. Yesterday I talked to Robert Holler, CEO of VersionOne, a maker of agile tools and the sponsor of the survey. He believes the most dramatic number is a 14%...

There was a really interesting Op-Ed in Sunday’s New York Times by Tony Schwartz at The Energy Project. As any good Scrum Master knows, finding a sustainable pace for the team is incredibly important to increasing velocity. At Scrum Inc., we talk about avoiding Muri...

Reconciling Innovation With Control: The Air Force's $1.3 Billion Lesson In Agile Steve Denning, Forbes 11 Dec 2012 What are we to make of the news that the Air Force recently canceled a six-year-old software modernization effort that had consumed $1.3 billion and...

As we prepare for the joint Joe Justice/WikiSpeed Scrum training in Redmond on 4-5 February, I'm reviewing the connection between Scrum and Lean. We continue to meet with key staff of the Lean Enterprise Institute to discuss opportunities to work together. John Shook,...