Scrum Gathering 2014

I used to attend Agile and quality related conferences years ago and have saved notes from many of them. While some topics have become overtaken by events since then, there still seem to be some useful ideas that I’d like to pass along. [My notes for this one were very short it seems.]

An opening thought offered was:

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, none is sufficient.” — Joseph Dunninger

Opening Keynote Ken Rubin on Economically Sensible Scrum

Ken’s thoughts offered were:

· Sprint Review is about inspecting and adapting the Product

· Sprint Retrospective is about inspecting and adapting the Process

· Think about a 4x4 baton race and “busyness” of people. We should “Watch the baton, not the runners.”

· Assume 80% busy for people, not 100%, else, where is the capacity to improve and take advantage of opportunities?

· Focus on the flow of work across the system (baton) [a very Kanban approach].

· Referenced a Clark and Wheelright study (1992) on multitasking [that Mike Cohn discusses on page 193 of his book Succeeding with Scrum.]

· T-shaped skills allow swarming (management responsibility if they form the teams).

Tim Wise “Enabling Distributed Agile Teams”

As a way to overcome difficulties caused by different time zones and lack of face to face communication Wise suggest an interesting technique, thenegation exercise. In this exercise, do a team brainstorm on “How can we make working with each other more miserable?” When all ideas are listed, the team selects the number one pain point and establishes a working agreement on how to address it.

Keynote by Richard Sheridan of Menlo Innovations (Joy Inc.)

He spoke about the sustainability of people at work. [I refer you to his books (Joy and Chief Joy Officer) as well as YouTube videos of his talks.