Australian Scrum Community

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Hi All,

One of the biggest challanges we face in introducing Scrum to an organisation is how to begin. Who do we need to involve the the begining, is normally underestimated and where the majority of agile failures fall short.

The message that we give to groups like a Project Control Board, our stakeholders, architecture, etc are vital to our success. Agility is required throughout the organisation and Scrum is the best framework to communicate and manage the level of flexibility we require in modern day software development.

On a recent project within nabCapital (a division of NAB) we concentrated on trying to address this fundamental problem. The solution was to be very transparent on our message and how we communicated progress.

I am in Sydney next week to present my work at a breakfast seminar (free admission). If you would like to come along and listen please feel free. Details are on the following link:

Invitation: Renewtek ‘Becoming Agile’ Breakfast Workshops

If you have any questions you can contact me on 0437 696 365.

Regards,
Martin Kearns ( CSC + CST )

Meeting on Monday 1st September between 5:00pm and 5:30pm at Citigate Siebel then moving on to Great Southern.

If you’re interested in coming along but can’t make the initial meeting put a comment on this message and I will contact you with mobile details.

Peter Hundermark (a Scrum Coach based out of South Africa) has announce the first meeting of the South African Scrum Users Group. He announced it on the Agile Announcement mailing list here and has arranged a time and venue for their very first meetings. If you’re in the area, I would encourage you to attend. Here are the details:

Cape Town: Wednesday 27 August from 18h00 (The Pavilion Conference Centre, Waterfront).

Pretoria/Johannesburg/Gauteng: Thursday 28 August from 18h00 (Momentum Auditorium 1, 268 West Avenue, Centurion).”

Agile Adoption Patterns – Amr Elssamadisy

To confess I was sent this book as a freeby from the publisher, the author used to work for ThoughtWorks whom I work for, and I like books on agile stuff. So you can read this with some skepticism. Honestly though if it wasn’t worth it I wouldn’t bother writing something on it. This book is good. I’m glad Amr took the time to write it.

Amr’s book is about adopting agile practices. If you adopt scrum then you inherently pick up a bunch of practices and this book can help you understand why you have this core set and what it is doing for you – in case you missed it.

If you want to help your team(s) or your company grow or mature in agile software development this book can help you decide where to go and how to get there.

So what does Amr have to say:
“Learning is the bottleneck” “All agile practices … help the team learn fast. By cycling in every possible practice, Agile teams accelerate learning, addressing the bottleneck of software engineering.”

To help you craft your adoption strategy there is a section on “Business Value” and another on “Smells”. Then you get some nice diagrams showing you how maximise the former and blow away the latter using a combination of agile practices.

After helping you define the strategy you the get some nice pattern style descriptions of the practices. There over 30 practices described, such as “Done state”, “Retrospective”, “Self-organising team”.

The back end contains a couple of case studies to help tie the story together.

Scrum is delightfully vague about a lot of other practices that XPers, and Crystal Clear folks might adopt. If you are looking to help your teams adopt more practices this is a great place to start.

Amr writes lucidly and from experience. The language is clear, as is the purpose. There are other books on Agile that are utter rubbish, this is not. The book is well targetted at people with some experience in agile software development, so there is little hand holding in this. If you’ve done more than 2 sprints you’ll be fine with this book.

Certified ScrumMaster

Melbourne – 25-26 Aug 2008
Brisbane – 28-29 Aug 2008
Sydney – 1-2 Sep 2008