Australian Scrum Community

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.

“One of the great things about SCRUM is that it gets all of the news visible, whether it’s good or bad”

In this video Ken Scwaber @ google, in The Enterprise and Scrum, in just about any agile blog/book you’ll read the author will let you know that when using scrum (agile) to deliver your project you will receive news, and you receive it early. Before you start your project you’ll think “That’s great! I want to know what’s going on, if scrum can do that, I want it.”

Receiving this news early can be dramatic cultural shift for an organisation – maybe even a tectonic one. With a long project (> 6 months) using SDLC/Waterfall you find out something is a little late or off whack and you adjust your Gantt chart and voila you are tracking beautifully to schedule, then at the end pow you’re late, and no one knows why/where/what happened. There have been so many little adjustments, buried in one abstract document you can’t pick anyone that caused the problem, if you can remember any.

“If you use SCRUM you will know what sort of deep trouble you’re in right after one month.”

So you adopt SCRUM and after one sprint there it is in your face, nothing is done¹ . What do you do?

You could:

• Work faster (ie longer hours)
• Add more people (can you afford that?)
• Drop some scope (what will the customers think?)
• Change the date (can you afford this?)

These may allow you to deliver on time, but you haven’t fixed the problem. This is why you don’t want to use SCRUM. You can’t hide your problems anymore.

As a scrum master the problems will come up at the daily scrum and the sprint retrospective. So they must be dealt with, you can no longer hide the problems by shifting bars on a Gantt chart and you can’t use work arounds as these don’t solve the problem. Your teams expects you to remove the impedements.

As a product owner the scrum master will start bothering you with problems that they don’t have the authority to remove. These are impediments that are stopping you backlog being worked on, value is not being created, so you need to deal with these.

As an organisation/company/other you have rapidly exposed any problem you have lived with and now it has to be dealt with.

So you probably don’t want to use scrum. It’s too hard, and exposes too much.

¹ As in completed and ready for release.

This is an attempt to bring together a list of blogs that are primarily focused on SCRUM (rather than agile in general). If there are any other blogs that should be on the list please stick the link in the comments and I will add it to the list.

Jeff Sutherland
Andy – The SCRUM Blog
Mike Cohn – Mountain Goat Software
Scrum alliance
Implementing scrum
Scrum ideas
Danube technologies – the makers of ScrumWorks
Kane Mar’s Planet Scrum
HL Arledge
Chris Sterling

This is the new book by Ken Schwaber another one for the scrum bookshelf.

All details here are from Amazon.

Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Microsoft Press (June 13, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0735623376
ISBN-13: 978-0735623378

The Enterprise and Scrum at Amazon.com