Australian Scrum Community

This website is an online presence for Australian’s who use the Scrum software development process. Spread the word! More details...

James Brett has started a series of interviews where he asks the following five questions:

1. Can you describe what you would consider the top Scrum enabler in an organisation?
2. Where do you see Scrum in 5 years time?
3. What has been your toughest Scrum challenge so far?
4. What makes you passionate about Scrum?
5. What can we learn from you about Scrum?

The first interview is now available: Issue 1: Ron Jeffries.

The Agile Advice blog has links to two interesting articles that have been recently rerepublished by Fast Company.

Engines of Democracy (from 1999). Self organising teams who build jet engines for General Electric.

Manufacturing jet engines may not be like developing software, but…

The most interesting measure may be one that the people at GE/Durham talk about themselves. They don’t really think that their main job it to make jet engines. They think that their main job is to make jet engines better.

They Write the Right Stuff (from 1996). Writing software for the space shuttle. Their process is the opposite of agile, but the article gives insight into the effort, cost and discipline required to write (almost) bug free software.

Some of the figures are astounding:

• Budget of $35 million per year.
• Team of 260.
• 2,500 pages of documentation for a change that required 6,366 lines of code.
• 40,000 pages of documentation.
• One error in each of the last three releases (420,000 lines of code).

James just pinged me to let me know that the January 2009 Australian Scrum Survey results are now available for viewing. Interesting stuff! Check it out.

Kudos to James and Martin for collating and publishing the results.

All the best for 2009. To keep things rolling in Scrum-land, James Brett and Martin Kearns have put together an Australian focused survey. The intent is to get the big picture of where Scrum is down under. The survey results will be made public.

You can help them out by taking the Scrum survey.

Just a heads up that Ken Schwaber left a comment on yesterday’s Some Turbulence Expected post. If you’re accessing this site via an aggregator you may have missed it, so here it is:

Scrum doesn’t provide a lot of stuff. Instead, it exposes a lot of stuff. Like, whether you can build a potentially usable or shippable increment of software in one iteration, or sprint. That is very hard to do and most organizations don’t have the engineering skills and infrastructure to do so. We measure what they can do, and the rest of “undone” work has to be done at the end of the project or release, or stabilization phase. This includes stuff like refactoring, integration and regression testing, performance and stability testing, etc. That the developers can’t get this done within the iteration is terrible, and certainly backloads the whole project. However, now that we know exactly how bad it is, we can quantify the benefits of improving it. This certainly tests the engineering organization – do they want to go through the hard work of attaining competence, or would they rather change Scrum so their inadequacies are no longer visible.

Scrum will favor those who don’t change it and use its transparancy to identify and solve engineering problems. They will work to create a full, shippable increment every iteration. These will be great engineering organizations that will outcompete others every day. Think Toyota and GM.
Ken