Scrum - The Art of the Possible

May 10, 2014

Writing is a good way for me to digest information, so in this post I am collecting important principles and practices of Scrum. Lastly I am listing questions that I have about Scrum and references for further reading.

If you can only do one thing, watch the video Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell!

Below you see the city of trees that we built during our two sprints at a ScrumMaster training. Impressive, huh? :-)

Building a city in the trees with Scrum

ScrumMaster training

This week our team attended a 2 day training by Andrea Tomasini and Niels Verdonk of agile42, with the eventual goal to become a Certified ScrumMaster. After using Scrum with my teams for the better parts of 2 years, I thought I had a pretty good idea about how Agile and Scrum work. During this training I realized that there are many more things to learn.

I am collecting bullet points of what I found most interesting, as I don’t have further explanations for most of them. Maybe these notes can still be useful for others to start thinking about Agile and Scrum in new ways.

Principles

Practices

Questions

  1. In Scrum we want to get feedback fast, in order to learn and adapt fast as well. At the same time we don’t want to build prototypes but always build production ready quality. Isn’t that a contradiction?
  2. How to introduce shared responsibility in a team, while still getting a sense for the performance of an individual developer?
  3. Scrum aims to deliver the highest possible value in each iteration. Does this always have to be business value, or is e.g. learning considered valuable?
  4. Which type of project is Scrum not a good fit for?

References