Points of Interest

The Scrumday conference 2011 (which was sold out) is past. The focus of yesterday was on workshops (I enjoyed »Value driven product development framework with Scrum« by Jürgen Margetich, bor!sgloger Consulting GmbH) and community building. Today started with keynotes of Thomas Kiessling (Deutsche Telekom) and Ken Schwaber (»How to sell Scrum in your organisation«) and continued with traditional talks. The last one was done by Boris Gloger and André Häusling built ’round their new book »Erfolgreich mit Scrum – Einflussfaktor Personalmanagement«, a topic rarely covered yet (I hope the book will appear in english language also). A further talk I enjoyed was »Agile Developer Skills« by Christoph Mathis, also built around a book².

As always, it was a great chance to learn things from practitioners which you cannot learn from books. This was a worthwhile event for the Scrum addict I am :) .

¹ Boris Gloger, André Häusling »Erfolgreich mit Scrum – Einflussfaktor Personalmanagement« 2011, ISBN 978-3-446-42515-6, pages 81 through 85

2 Christoph Mathis, Andreas Wintersteiger »Agile Developer Skills«

Janus, Vatican, via Wikipedia, public domain

Ken Schwaber continued his excellent training on Friday.

Training Style

The key ingredients of his style are:

• Story Telling – an important technique, and I recommend this posting of Garr Reynolds (found via Boris Gloger, who also mentions the importance of story telling in his book¹).
• Teaching as a one-man-front-show. By keeping those phases short, chances are given that the students actually listen and learn.
• Team exercises that create insight. Those were always timeboxed, and a great chance to improve your skills as a team player.
• Joking to aerate the presentation. Ken is really a master in making use of various incidents for joking, may it be something an attendee just said or a rescue van passing by.

Topics

Topics of this day included the definition of done (there’s exactly nothing left to do), legacy code and the exponential growth of technical debt (which is capable of killing your company), teambuilding, emergent architectures and selling Scrum to managers respectively customers.

Using a squirrel story in the morning and an obviously simple contract exercise a couple of hours later, Ken teached us that it is damn hard to get rid of traditional habits (see the Janus picture at the top of this posting). He also mentioned how simple it is to introduce and how difficult it is to do Scrum.

Fuzziness

Once more I noticed that different trainers and authors teach things differently. While Boris Gloger¹ describes six roles, Ken Schwaber still uses the formula »Scrum Team = Development Team + Scrum Master + Product Owner«.

According to Ken, the Product Owner, as a member of the Scrum Team, should attend the restrospective meetings, a topic also mentioned by Roman Pichler². AFAIR I read contrary statements in other books, and Victor Szalvay writes:

The product owner does not attend this meeting.

As Scrum is a framework, not a religion, such differences do not really matter. It is much more important to internalize what Scrum is all about.

Conclusion

Two intense but worthwhile days are over. It is always a great joy and pleasure to work with people you just met, and Ken’s training style was acknowledge being excellent by the attendees.

¹ Boris Gloger, »Scrum – Produkte zuverlässig und schnell entwickeln« 2011, ISBN 978-3-446-42524-8, page 181

2 Roman Pichler, »Agile Product Management with Scrum – Creating Products that Customers Love« 2010, ISBN-13 978-0-321-60578-8, page 104

Weibliche Ente von Petr Kratochvil

As already outlined in one of the previous postings, certifications do not necessarily tell you anything about the knowledge, skills, or competences of the owner. On the other hand, certificates are usually seen as an evidence in someone’s Curriculum Vitae that she has a certain degree of maturity on the mentioned matter.

After introducing Scrum successfully for my current employer about 20 months ago, the experience I gained since then, and reading some books, I felt it was time to prepare for the Professional Scrum Master (aka PSM) certification provided by Scrum.org. Since Ken Schwaber holds the class in Franktfurt (which is just a trip of about 130 kilometers), there was no excuse to not attend and to not learn from »the master himself«.

Attendees (and Ken) may know why I’ve chosen a duck as the picture for this posting :) . For me, it has a further meaning. A duck is a bird which can walk, swim, and fly. But it is not excellent in any of those disciplines. That’s what I feel about agile in common and Scrum in special. I learned a lot about it, but the more you learn, the more you know that there’s much more you want to discover. While practising Scrum, I always want to learn more »to do a better job tomorrow«.

People came to Frakfurt from several central european countries. The course is held in english language, and frankly, I really enjoy Ken’s style of training. It’s just the right mixture of humor and focus which, combined with the usual team exercises, allows to learn as much as possible. So yes, I’m eagerly waiting for the second day :) .

Companies usually exist »to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners.«. Ken Schwaber mentiones[1],[2] that Scrum is not a methodology, but a framework for risk management and value optimization by frequent replanning. The key advantage of Scrum is that impediments and dysfunctions which prevent an organisation from being successful are made transparent to everyone, so that they can be addressed and solved systematically. Ken also warns that organisations which do use Scrum not to analyse and optimize themselves will fail miserably.

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In Scrum, at least the two most basic boards should exist, the Product Backlog Board and the Sprint Backlog Board. There are a couple of synonyms for the latter one, like Selected Backlog Board or Task Board. User Stories flow over these boards, using the following approach.

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In the world of agile software development, user stories are a common way of creating product backlog items. They are often found in Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) environments, and often printed to small cards or hand-written on index cards. The advantages of user stories include that they are simple to understand and maintain. In case you are interested in more details, you might as well read »User Stories Applied« by Mike Cohn[1].

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I came to the software business »through the back door«. I joined »the company« back in 2000, and I was its very first full time employee. I’ve seen growing the company, its products, and myself. Meanwhile I’m the product manager for interiorcad, and the one who successfully introduced Scrum 20 months ago.

Did I enjoy the journey? Sure, and I learned a lot. As a team player, you have to ensure that people are making the right decisions by providing the right arguments. As a change manager, you have to convince people, day by day. Sometimes it is necessary to overwhelm individuals also, though it is not much fun. As a product manager, you need a clear vision, you need to be open minded and you need to listen. And you need to resist the temptation to try to suit everybody. The latter issue is hard for yourself, and it is hard for your partners as well. But the key to your personal and your employer’s success is focus.

I’m currently transmogrifying my product into a product »that customers love«¹. We’re building an appearently simple feature which is capable of completely changing the perception of what interiorcad is. My teammates sometimes disagreed, sometimes they complained, and some colleagues even tried to antagonize it. This week we encountered a major breakthrough. During the last couple of days, some of them stated that I was right and it was a worthwhile effort. I’m not a stubborn guy. But when you know you are right, stubbornness is not a bug, but a feature :) .

My life is just half over, and I served the same company for more than a decade. I’m really curious what interests, challenges, and opportunities will arise during the next thirty years.

¹ Roman Pichler 2010, »Agile Product Management with Scrum – Creating Products That Customers Love«, ISBN 978-0-321-60578-8