Australian Scrum Community

In case you missed it, Tobias Mayer recently posted a message on ScrumDevelopment about a presentation from the recent Scrum Gathering called “The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach”, by Lyssa Adkins. It’s an excellent presentation and Lyssa has taken the time to put it on YouTube. I’d encourage you to watch it.

Here’s Tobias’ original message and here are links to the YouTube videos: Part 1 and Part 2

Another useful resource, from Pete Deemer and Gabrielle Benefield.

The Scrum Primer is an in-depth introduction to the theory and practice of Scrum, and includes data on results from a large-scale corporate adoption of Scrum.

Agile 2008 is happening in Toronto from August 4-8 this year. Right now, we’re in the middle of the proposal review process. The neat thing about this is that you can be part of this by registering , reviewing and voting on proposals.

Whilst a short format submission of mine seems to have been given the flick, my colleague Mark Summers and I still have a session on teamwork in contention. Please have a look and vote on it… especially if you have a positive comment!

On other news, this week certainly was a crazy one in London. On April Fool’s day it was announced that my employer, Conchango, is being acquired by EMC to become the hub of its European consulting business. Don’t believe the Microsoft-only flavour of The Register article – I am currently ScrumMaster on a project on which we’re using open source Java technology on RedHat Linux. Conchango does however offer the Scrum for Team Systems add-in for Visual Studio Team System.

Today I woke up to find London covered in a thick blanket of snow and had the Olympic torch go right past my partner and I outside St. Paul’s without seeing a thing admidst the mayhem.

I have no idea, but Joe Little has made an attempt to put a figure on it and comes up with some interesting numbers!

A Commitment is not a Guarantee: Our own Richard Banks discusses the issue of the Product Owner assuming that a commitment from the team, to complete backlog items, is a guarantee.

The commitment by the team is a statement that they are devoting themselves to getting all of the items in the sprint backlog “done”. But it is not a guarantee – a guarantee is a statement along the lines of “if we don’t do this then we will …” with some sort of remediation or punishment clause at the end.

Scrum Project Management as a Simple Rules Framework: Mike Cottmeyerwritea about what Scrum is, and is not.

Scrum is a barely sufficient, simple rules framework for developing great products. It gives us space to apply our knowledge and skills and the freedom to adapt to our surroundings. We just need to be aware of what Scrum leaves out and be prepared to fill in the blanks.