About the Munich Scrum Gathering - pt. 1
As promised, here go some lines about the Scrum Gathering which took place here in Munich last week.
On Monday morning, Jeff Sutherland (blog) kick-started the gathering with his Opening Address presentation.
Jeff’s presentation was overarching, as I’ve expected. Some interesting highlights were:
- If (and only if) your team’s Scrum implementation is really mature, use a story points burndown. In a team which has been using scrum successfully, doing so will make the administrative overhead lighter (compared to estimate time to completion for the tasks the developer has in progress), with a lower risk getting the wrong idea from the burndown state.
- Avoid multitasking. A lot of “work in progress” also means a lot of “waste in progress”. We can only deliver business value when the user story is “Done”.
- If only one element of your team can do a specific task/role/function, starting doing pairing immediately.
- The Product Owner can easily double the velocity of a Scrum team by getting the User Stories in the backlog to a high “Ready” state. I really like this idea – this needs to be done as an integral part of the “backlog grooming”.
- A team of average developers performs better than one with Prima Donna developers (or a couple of them, for that matter). No surprises here, but it was interesting to see the numbers that back up this truism.
