Suggested Resources for attendees at the Jim York Certified ScrumMaster course on Dec 4-5

Here are some suggested resources that came out of a Certified ScrumMaster course that Jim York and I just led.

Books

On the Web

http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/
http://www.planningpoker.com/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/ -- The Scrum-Dev yahoo discussion group. Enter with salt.

Articles

New New Product Development Game by Takeuchi and Nonaka. (See http://www.hbr.com/) This is the article that directly led to Scrum (along with other sources). It also gave Scrum its name.


Key Words

Kaikaku - a rapid or radical change event (such as the initial implementation of Scrum)

Kaizen - continuous improvement (also used to refer to continuous improvement actions)

"Go to the Gemba" - Gemba in Japanese means "actual place" or the place where truth is. Similarities to the Godfather phrase "Go to the mattresses". With "go to the Gemba" we are typically asking a manager to go visit the Agile Team Room.

Genchi Genbutsu - Japanese for "Go and see for yourself". More roughly translated as "don't manage from behind a desk". In Agile, we might say, "Come to the demo and see for yourself" to a stakeholder. Or, to a manager "if you want to really know how the project is going, come to the Daily Standup or come to an Iteration Review." Closely related to "go to the Gemba" and Gemba Attitude. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genchi_Genbutsu
The ScrumMaster role:
"...whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the
mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure." Hamlet. (That's a lot of what a ScrumMaster does.)

Pictures
Communications Nodes PDF. See http://agileconsortium.pbwiki.com/Presentations
The idea here is to show why we need small teams.
See also earlier posts tagged Recommended Reading.
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The Nokia Test

Nokia (the cell phone maker) uses Scrum.  Well, actually it is/was a small Euro 50 billion joint venture, called Nokia Siemens Networks.  They have developed a test to check whether a team is really using Scrum or just doing what I call Cowboy Agile (see wikipedia on cowboy coding). Or doing Agilefall (talking Agile terms, but really doing mostly waterfall).

The Nokia Test is in two parts.

First, are you doing Iterative Development?

• Iterations must be timeboxed to less than 4 weeks
• Software features must be tested and working at the end of each iteration
• The Iteration must start before specification is complete

The experience is that if you ask a lot of "Scrum" teams if they can pass this part of the test, they can't. If you are at a conference, often not a single team in the room.

The next part of the test checks whether you are doing Scrum (in Nokia's opinion):

• •You know who the product owner is
• •There is a product backlog prioritized by business value
• •The product backlog has estimates created by the team
• •The team generates burndown charts and knows their velocity
• •There are no project managers (or anyone else) disrupting the work of the team

My reaction:
I think this is an excellent way to deal with Cowboy Agile or Agilefall.

Let me say this loud and clear: a firm can't in good faith say "we tried Scrum" and then move away from it if they never had any teams that could pass the Nokia test. And pass for a reasonable period of time. Of course they could say "we tried Scrum", but they did not. (I will not define right now what 'pass' would require.)

The Nokia Test is demanding. That is clear. But a test of this nature is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition to doing professional agile software development. (Or did we expect to get out of Fred Brooks' tar pit by doing unprofessional software development?)

There are some forces in a firm that want to do Cowboy Agile or Agilefall or want Agile to fail ("it's moving my cheese"). This is true in every firm that I have worked in, I believe. So, if you use the Nokia Test, expect to get some resistance.

The Nokia Test is arguably too minimal. There are many other important parts of Agile or Scrum that it does not cover. Are the things in the test the most important parts? My thought is that this collection of principles and practices provides a good core of Agile/Scrum that will defend you from the most common dysfunctions. Not all. Is there a better test? Probably we could define one, but let's pass the Nokia Test now.

Should the test be significantly more detailed? I think not. First, to work with any test, we need the test to be simple enough to be comprehended easily by most of the people involved. In this way, it becomes self-policing. Second, Agile/Scrum needs to be adaptive, so having a lengthy test that puts all teams in the same straight-jacket would noticeably limit that adaptability.

What are your thoughts? Are you aware of similar tests? How does your firm limit Cowboy Agile?

Carnival of the Agilists - 11/29

Once again we are pleased and humbled to be included within the Carnival of the Agilists collection of blog posts. See here: http://trailridgeconsulting.com/blog/?p=104

For all the prior Carnival of the Agilists selections, see here: http://www.agilealliance.org/show/1670

Enjoy. These are recommended.

This is not to say that I would agree with every word of every post, but "two heads are better than one" is an key idea in Agile. The team is wiser than any one individual. (Yes, I know there are exceptions, and a good team knows when to follow the leader.)