Points of Interest

Nachdem ich in den letzten Jahren einige (zumeist englischsprachige) Bücher und sonstige Quellen zum Thema Scrum gelesen habe, lese ich derzeit das Buch »Scrum – Produkte zuverlässig und schnell entwickeln« von Boris Gloger1. Es ist das bisher beste, weil es den aktuellen Stand hochkomprimiert auf dem Silbertablett präsentiert. Überraschenderweise liegt es in deutscher Sprache vor – was mich üblicherweise eher abschreckt, weil deutschsprachige Fachbücher sich oft mit Themen beschäftigen, die im angelsächsischen Sprachraum fast schon wieder “Schnee von gestern” sind. Im vorliegenden Falle ist es erfreulicherweise eher umgekehrt :) .

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Scrum is about building a high performance team (in case someone can share a good german translation, please drop me a line).

Lyssa Adkins suggests a »high performance tree«¹ to visualize the basic Scrum values, the characteristics of high collaboration and the outcomes. I’ve never been good in creating artistic drawings, but as Lyssa writes »You can see from the illustration that you need not be a good artist to do this.«, here’s an adaption. Instead of the tree, I used a boat metaphor:

The high performance boat

Feel free to comment, download, and reuse it. On request, I’ll also share the original source drawing in SVG format.

¹ Lyssa Adkins, »Coaching Agile Teams« 2010, ISBN-13 978-0-321-63770-3, Page 24

Graphics by openclipart.org, public domain

Last week, a team member complained about the behaviour of another one and asked me to talk to her. So I did.

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This posting exists due to a discussion about Scrum failure in a Scrum User Group. Common causes for Scrum failing is the absence of a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, or the roles not being played correctly.

Let’s first face the reason why Scrum exists. What is motivating a company’s management to install a Scrum framework? Privately owned companies often are “administered to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners.“. Less surprising, the answer to the above question is obvious – business figures.

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Rugby ball via openclipart.org, user molumen, public domain

While I really like my job, I also tend to keep professional and private things separate. »Points of Interest« serves me as a diary for the things I do in my spare time. It does not deliver insight into my “daytime” activities. Starting with this posting, I will weaken this habit a little bit.

From day one I got in touch with it, I was very exited about Scrum. My interest was triggered by my CTO, who one day decided to change the way we develop our software, and who sent me to the XP days conference – as it took place just a five minutes walk from our office, there was no excuse to not attend :) .

I immediately realized I was too late to know Scrum, and I immediately began to catch up what I missed. It’s not that Scrum is a religion or an ideology. Also it will not solve all of your problems. But it will solve more than you would by designing your own process. And you can tweak it to your needs whenever necessary (though I recommend to wait until you really know what you are doing).

Meanwhile I’m allowed to call myself a »Certified Scrum Product Owner«, a title anyone can gather attending a two day’s training (I will blog about that later). I’m still busy implementing »Scrum by the book« at the tech quarter of my employer (a quite interesting and challenging task), while I’m eagerly and curiously waiting for the things to come after we passed this point.

I’m neither a Scrum expert nor a Scrum trainer. I will just write about my personal impressions and insights while introducing a Scrum based software development process. I anticipate that some profesisonals will disagree in details I will be writing about. The main intention of the upcoming postings is to help others who try to do similar things. If you want to reinvent the wheel, just hit Ctrl-W. If you think my postings can help you to avoid some traps and pitfalls, I hope they actually will. In case you are using an RSS reader and you are not interested in my other postings (e.g. about the 516th feature I hacked for MoNav or the 8519 mapping trip for openstreetmap), just make use of the possibility to subscribe to the Scrum category only.