Yesterday I was invited with a colleague to join the Agile event 7 at the Arrows Group. The speakers were very interesting, Maarten Hoppen and Jeff Sutherland. Jeff Sutherland is one of the inventors of scrum, so I was eager to go. For the people that think he’s that means he’s the inventor of this…

He’s not. Scrum is a way of being productive with a group, of developing software in a incremental and agile way. When Jeff Sutherland was inventing scrum, he really looked at the rugby game*. Why are some teams really successful, while others lay behind? One of the answers that he found was that the best teams were pushing themselves to improve. Fighting to become better every sprint. In sports doing nothing is standstill.

For a part his talk was about convincing people that scrum is a good thing to do. Since this was an agile event, I guess no-one in the room needed to be convinced of that. Anyway, one graph he showed was this guy. A lot less failed projects, but we should still be able to do better then this. But how to improve?

Scrum anti patterns at Agile Event 7

One of the scrum anti patterns that Jeff Sutherland mentioned was in handling interruptions in a bad way. It’s a challenge that a lot of teams face: unplanned change. The blog post dealing with emergencies explains the problem and possible solutions very well!

After the presentation there was a workshop, and after that there was a short Q&A session. One of the questions asked was about communicating scrum results towards management. One of the most powerful ways of communicating to management how good a team is doing is by comparing the velocity of a team. So far we haven’t really been measuring that, but I think we should give it a try.

* A lot of sport references. He’s not a rugby player though :-).

All credits for the rugby scrum image go to Pierre Selim, who released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.