# Monday, August 9, 2010

Last Thursday I did a Scrum session at VSLive on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wa. I lectured for about 30 minutes and then we went for a Q&A, just how I like it. Actually we really had a true conversation, people commenting on each other’s questions and comments, etc. Here is what we talked about:

  • The Agile Manifesto and how it is just four items
    • The Agile Manifest is about values, not rules
    • The values of the Agile movement: communication, delivering business value, collaboration, embracing change
    • How some agile practitioners are not really agile, they forgot the core values and are too rigid
  • Other agile methodologies like XP and Kanban
  • Where scrum came from: Japan and Harvard Business Review (1986)
  • The Scrum 101 stuff: the daily scrum, iterations, the team, backlogs
  • The world’s greatest project management tool: Microsoft Excel
  • A little on velocity and agile estimation
  • A lot on testing, where to put testers
    • One guy had his testers outside of the sprint-and it worked for him
    • One guy thought about staggering the testers one week behind the dev sprint (we had mixed reviews on that)
  • It is ok to change Scrum!
    • How the inventor of Scrum wants my head for that bullet ;)
    • The best approach is a “buffet table
  • Lean processes at Toyoda and how it relates to software development (a la  Kanban)

Glad that we had a conversation rather than a straight lecture.

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