Perfecting Scrum Basics

Jeff Sutherland: Reaching Hyper-Productivity with Outsourced Development TeamsPosted by Jeff Sutherland and Guido Schoonheim on Nov 07, 2008 07:14 AM SummaryIn this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, and Guido Schoonheim, CTO...

Gabrielle Benefield, founder of the Scrum Training Institute, talks about her role as Agile coach at Yahoo. How does Scrum scale? What productivity gains did they achieve? What where the problems? Dave Prior from PMI creates a video podcast at the Oredev Conference in...

Xebia France hosted an excellent ScrumMaster Certification course at La Defense in Paris. What a great location for a CSM course! Not only the French, but Danes, Swedes, Germans, Poles, and Swiss are often there. Courses sell out quickly and the next one is in March....

Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts Posted by Vikas Hazrati on Oct 29, 2008 04:45 AM Contracts are required to bridge the gap of trust and uncertainty between different organizations thus enabling them to work together. Traditional ‘fixed price,...

During a Scrum Certification course in Atlanta, I gave a presentation at CNN for the local Agile community - Pretty Good Scrum: Secret Sauce for Distributed Teams. A good time was had by all, particularly at the dinner after the Agile meeting.

A lot of people confuse product vision with strategy vision for the company. Product vision has to do with crafting a product that is so cool that when people see it they don't understand how they ever lived without it. Most senior management teams have no product...

An update on Money for Nothing and Your Change for Free can be found at this link. A team was working on the Open Plans Agile Contract Project in 2008. The following general principles were agreed upon. We mutually agree on working together, and thereby build trust in...

Yesterday, I gave the keynote presentation at the Scrum Gathering - Pretty Good Scrum: Secret Sauce for Distributed Teams. Ken Schwaber, Scrum Alliance leadership, and a packed house are all here. It is raining off and on in Stockholm so the weather is not great but...

When Alistair Cockburn says something like: "There is no such thing as 'agile specification'. The phrase is a hoax." This is exactly the kind of discussion we had at the Agile Manifesto meeting in 2001. It means there is something really interesting to talk about....

Scrum was originally designed to support emerging object technology environments, which have now become the dominant paradigm in software development. One of the goals was to get the organization of the team to reflect the potential flexibility of the software since...

Scott Downey, MySpace Agile Coach, has a way of bootstrapping Scrum teams to a high performing state in a company that is about 1/3 waterfall, 1/3 ScrumButt with project managers, and 1/3 pure Scrum with only Scrum roles. Scott consistently takes teams to 240% of the...

Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, presented a case study with me at Agile 2008 on how to get maximum productivity and quality out of a distributed Scrum. The solution shows how to create distributed velocity = local velocity, distributed quality = local quality, and...

A good Scrum overview is hard to find even though there are many of them out there. Here is one that might be useful next time your waterfall manager wants to know, "What is Scrum?" Scrum Agile Software Engineering Management Dan Greening, Citrix Online Scrum is a...

Crisp Academy presents Deep Lean Learn from the experts! 2 days with Mary, Tom, Jeff, and Henrik Sep 25-26, 2008 Lean Scrum XP Deep Lean is an in-depth seminar targeted to people familiar with Lean, Agile, Scrum and XP software development. This will be a unique...

In 1993 at Easel Corporation when we started the first Scrum, I thought the ScrumMaster needed to see how to land a Sprint on a date, just like landing a fighter aircraft at the end of the runway. If you are high on the glidepath in a fighter you can easy land in the...

HICSS paper submissions are in and we are seeking Agile experts to review these papers. All reviews must be complete by August 15. This is your chance for an earlybird view on some of the latest Agile thinking. Contact Jeff Sutherland if you want to review one or more...

The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success by Hirotaka Takeuchi, Emi Osono, and Norihiko Shimizu Harvard Business Review, June 2008 (free online during June) The Toyota Production System (TPS) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Toyota's success. TPS...

It's time for you to get your most scintillating Agile theories together, write a kick-ass paper that could get published in the IEEE library and spend a week in beautiful Hawaii next January. Sound good? Then get writing! HICSS-42 CALL FOR PAPERS - due 15 June 2008...

Verma, Vikas (2008) Managing Offshore Software Projects. Icfai University Press. A new book republished the Scrum case study on the highest performing large project ever recorded. Sutherland, J, Viktorov, A., and Blount, J. (2006) Adaptive Engineering of Large...

Here is today's best question in my long list of emails. The Sales guys don't want Scrum in a company because they think they can't commit to the customer to close deals. "We need to sign the contract first. The customer does not sign the contract, if finish date,...

PatientKeeper runs a Type C Scrum and quadrupled revenue in 2007. HIMSS is the biggest IT show in healthcare and PatientKeeper was one of the hottest companies there. "I'm such a PK groupee now! I'll be sure to get that contract signed in the next 2 weeks."...

I'm leaving Stockholm today after working with Crisp on Scrum training this week. In my bag are the new, upgraded, Crisp planning poker cards. Developers have been asking for more colors. We now have eight colors to support a Scrum team so each person has a different...