Scrum gets more and more common as an agile method for the management of projects. Those who want to use the model of Scrum successfully should first take a closer look at the description of the three roles and not mistake the Scrum Master with a Team Leader.
Author: Marion Eickmann, CEO of agile42, www.agile42.com, first published in German in the IX-Magazin 9/2009
This is a book about leadership. This is not an easy topic to discuss in a book, but this one gives you some tools that will help you to assess situations and act on them. I think that the authors give a very good definition of leadership when they explain their title: “Standing back does not imply abdicating all responsibility, but rather requires leaders to perform a careful balancing act between stepping back to let the right people in the organization do their thing and stepping up to provide steering when the team has strayed off course”. The deliver part exists because the most important measure of success is defined as delivering value to the business.
Methods & Tools has just published in its Fall 2009 issue "Mature Scrum at Systematic". Co-written by Carsten Ruseng Jakobsen and Jeff Sutherland, this article explains how the experiences from combining Lean, CMMI and Scrum have led Systematic to identify examples of explicit guidance from CMMI that help to execute Scrum activities even better.
“Agile is all about teams working together to produce great software. As an Agile coach, you can help your team go from first steps to running with Agile to unleashing their full Agile potential.”
Scrum Planet is a web site that aggregates for RSS feeds focused on Scrum and agile project management. If you know about a good blog feed that is missing from the current roster, I would be please to add it. Thanks for your cooperation.
TV Agile is a directory of agile software development videos and tutorials, categorizing material on all agile aspects: scrum, TDD, lean, XP, etc. External contributions are encouraged.
There was a time when software developers worked with consultants that will do things for their company or teach some technical knowledge. Agile approaches have brought forward another type of people: coaches. According to Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, a coach doesn’t tell you what to do, rather she shows you how she thinks you might do things and hope that it will help you to improve your situation. She leads by example. It is not easy to write a book on this type of topic. The authors recognize this situation and manage to achieve a good balance between general advice and practical usage reports.
Methods & Tools is the sponsor of a large number of software development conferences, but I cannot find the time and budget to visit them. This year I managed to find some time after the publication of my summer issue to visit Wednesday the Jazoon, an important Java event located in Zurich. Besides the global morning keynote, the conference has five parallel tracks, so the first thing in the morning is to make your choice between 30 presentations. This is easier for me, because I am not a Java specialist and so I focused on talks with content that could reach outside the Java community.
