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.