When I talk with fellow developers new to Scrum, I often hear a fundamental misunderstanding about Sprints. These colleagues  are normally used to Waterfall or RUP methodologies. As a consequence, they think of Sprints as very short repetitions of the following phases: requirements (planning meeting), design, implementation, test (sprint review as acceptance).

And this is completely wrong!

Let me tell you why.

Agile, Methodology scrum, Waterfall

Recently, I was asked by a colleague why I like Scrum. I didn’t have a good answer at hand immediately, and since then the question bugged me. Therefore it’s time to give you my top ten now:

1. Team Spirit
2. Continuum Of Work Pressure
3. Don’t Assume, Show
4. Team Knowledge Over Experts
5. Control Is Good, Presentation Is Better
6. Continuous Improvement
7. True Incremental Development
8. No One-Man Shows
9. ROI Is The King
10. Fun

Agile, Methodology Agile, Continuous Improvement, Planning, ROI, scrum, team, Velocity

Peter Stevens from scrum-breakfast.com blogged today a really interesting article about an adapted scrum process for IT support. As Peter Stevens describes in his post on of his attendees in his workshop was the leader of IT Support for the EE Department of the ETH Zurich. They where facing the problem that their support group had to deal with daily business and they had to successfully compete medium term projects but their daily business was consuming all their time.

The answer to their problem was not strictly speaking Scrum… I suggest you read the interesting article from Peter!

Towards Agile Support

http://www.scrum-breakfast.com/2009/05/towards-agile-support.html

Methodology peter stevens, scrum, scrum-breakfast, Support

Lately, I asked myself why I like Scrum most. I’m a big fan of Scrum because of a lot of things. So I asked myself: “What is the root cause of all these”.

I tracked it down to two main things:

1. Focus
2. Feedback

I’ll come back to that later.

I’m also a big fan of Test Driven Development. Guess what,  I performed a root cause analysis on TDD, too. And once again:

1. Focus
2. Feedback

After that, I asked myself: “Are there other things I like with these root causes?”.

Yes there are:

• Playing Volleyball and Gaming in general: focus on playing (one round after another), feedback (you win or lose)
• Playing Saxophone: focus on playing (I forget everything else while playing, believe me), feedback (you hear what you play and you either like it or or you try harder)

So it seems, I’m addicted to the Focus-Feedback drug :-O

Methodology, Test Driven Development Feedback, Focus, scrum, TDD, Test Driven Development

Some people share the opinion that scrum and other agile development methods are easily maintainable with pencil and post-it only. Nonetheless there is a growing list of software solutions which support scrum methodology. Boris Gloger from Scrum 4 You publishes regularly reviews of scrum tools on his blog. I strongly recommend to take a look at his website and the scrum tools list!

http://scrum4you.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/scrum-tools-list/

http://scrum4you.wordpress.com

Methodology, Software Agile, boris gloger, scrum, scrum4you, tools