Australian Scrum Community

Agile Adoption Patterns – Amr Elssamadisy

To confess I was sent this book as a freeby from the publisher, the author used to work for ThoughtWorks whom I work for, and I like books on agile stuff. So you can read this with some skepticism. Honestly though if it wasn’t worth it I wouldn’t bother writing something on it. This book is good. I’m glad Amr took the time to write it.

Amr’s book is about adopting agile practices. If you adopt scrum then you inherently pick up a bunch of practices and this book can help you understand why you have this core set and what it is doing for you – in case you missed it.

If you want to help your team(s) or your company grow or mature in agile software development this book can help you decide where to go and how to get there.

So what does Amr have to say:
“Learning is the bottleneck” “All agile practices … help the team learn fast. By cycling in every possible practice, Agile teams accelerate learning, addressing the bottleneck of software engineering.”

To help you craft your adoption strategy there is a section on “Business Value” and another on “Smells”. Then you get some nice diagrams showing you how maximise the former and blow away the latter using a combination of agile practices.

After helping you define the strategy you the get some nice pattern style descriptions of the practices. There over 30 practices described, such as “Done state”, “Retrospective”, “Self-organising team”.

The back end contains a couple of case studies to help tie the story together.

Scrum is delightfully vague about a lot of other practices that XPers, and Crystal Clear folks might adopt. If you are looking to help your teams adopt more practices this is a great place to start.

Amr writes lucidly and from experience. The language is clear, as is the purpose. There are other books on Agile that are utter rubbish, this is not. The book is well targetted at people with some experience in agile software development, so there is little hand holding in this. If you’ve done more than 2 sprints you’ll be fine with this book.

Certified ScrumMaster

Melbourne – 25-26 Aug 2008
Brisbane – 28-29 Aug 2008
Sydney – 1-2 Sep 2008

How about we meet up in Sydney on the 1st of September. There’s a CSM course on that day so we could catch up with the trainers and trainees. Maybe set up some kind of regular schedule for meeting.

Is anyone in Sydney interested in a Scrum community get together? My employer has moved into a nice new office and it would be a shame that it went to waste.

I was thinking an evening and maybe even have a brief presentation by someone and then a few drinks. (Or a few drinks then brief presentation, or a brief presentation with a few drinks.)

Anyone up for it? If we have a few interested parties I’ll put a notice on the yahoo group.

Lachlan

Just before my round of scrums today I was thinking about our regular practice of leaning on something during the scrum. The prime position for one scrum being the table near the story wall. We joke about how it’s sometimes a Lean Up rather than a Stand Up (it’s joke, but not one of those funny jokes).

Is 15 minutes too long for us to stand still and listen without needing support? It smells wrong to me.

Watch out for leaning scrums something is wrong.