The XP Days Tour Starts Tomorrow
November 22nd, 2009 12:27 pm · English, Good to know, Scrum, Scrum as Business
As every year the XP Day Wave starts in Belgium.[1] The XP Conference in Mechelen is always worth to go, as a lot of very experience people will show up. The program [4] is really promising and I would love to go “Visual Management for Agile Teams”[5]. Unfortunately for me, it turned out far to late that I do have time this week
The second stop of the XP Tour is in Germany, Karlsruhe [3]. The organizer from Andrena have put together an extremely nice conference program. All big names in the German agile business are there to show what the can. I thing the talk you must visit is “Scrum and Legacy” [6]. It looks very promising.
And later this year on 7 and 8 of December the mother of the XP Day runs in London [3]. Based on the program you can see that the new buzz word on the horizon is Kanban and Lean in the agile world. The XP day in London usually sets trends. So I we should not wonder if we do have much more Lean discussion ongoing next year.
[2] http://xpdays.de/2009/index.html
[4] http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/Program.html
[5] http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/sessions/Visual%20Management%20for%20Agile%20Teams.htm
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Last CSM Training for 2009 in Munich
November 21st, 2009 09:38 am · Scrum
6 more weeks 2009… the last Certified ScrumMaster training from Boris 2009 is an english one in Munich with ScrumCooking @TNG! The 2 days CSM training is the requirement to be registered for the exam necessary to become a CSM under the rules of the Scrum Alliance - expect a huge amount of Scrum knowledge and deep insights in the Scrum flow, real world know how, talking about enterprise Scrum and a hands-on experience @ ScrumCooking. We had already 3 successfull trainings like this in munich in 2009 - thanks TNG!
Do you want to join us for a great CSM Training and Cooking? Register now!
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CSM Exam Info
November 20th, 2009 05:34 pm · After a training, English, Good to know
I want to forward an information from Howard Sublett (Scrum Alliance) to you - to make things around ScrumMaster certification process a bit more transparent to you…
“When a student first logs into the site (scrumalliance.org) and creates a profile, their expiry is set at 90 DAYS from that time for the window to complete the exam. After completion of the exam, the expiry is set at 2 years.”
3) you recieve an email and login dates from the Scrum Alliance to create and account on scrumalliance.org
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KnowledgeToGo | Rebecca Saxe | Mind Reading | TED
November 17th, 2009 08:19 am · Scrum
Rebecca Saxe, PhD [1], Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, did a wonderful talk about the behavior of kids in a moral riddle. She shows in this talk how kids learn the ability to read peoples mind and that the body builds this ability by creating a special area in the brain. It is very impressive to see that actually some people are simple not able to judge “correctly” because the brain is not capable to do it. Will we ever call this morally handicapped? I do not know.
It is a 16 min Video, that is worth to see and watch till the end. The interview is also amazing.
[1] http://bcs.mit.edu/people/saxe.html
[2] Picture from http://bcs.mit.edu/people/saxe.html
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Flow vs. Rhythm, or Kanban vs. Scrum!?
November 14th, 2009 03:32 pm · English, Production Systems, Scrum, Toyota Production System
Whenever I read articles or twitter comments about Kanban in Software Development, I have the feeling that most authors do not understand the topic about they write.
The famous Kanban system of Toyota was inspired by the way supermarkets supply their customers. “At Toyota, when a process goes to the preceding process to retrieve parts, it uses a kanban to communicate what parts have been used.” [1]. In the beginning it was the box “shopping card” that the post-process person used to communicate how much goods he needs from the preceding process. Later this was optimized by the idea of the one-piece flow. So the box was reduced so it could only hold one piece.
People argue now, that this indicates a flow. Well in fact it is not a flow. It is an iteration! A rhythm, a beat. At every beat some part gets delivered (maybe only one). A beat is a distinct moment in time, separated by a pause. So it is not a “flow”. A series of beats creates a rhythm. In martial arts it also looks always like a flow, but in fact between every “beat” is a pause. So again it is not a flow. It is a continuous stream of beats. Better comparable with a dance than with a water flow.
We are humans. Humans are used to rhythms, people needs rhythms. You can see it everywhere. In music, in arts, in live, in our heart beat.
So iterations are the core element of continuity. Flow does only exists as a phenomenon in the non-biology nature. The old principle natura non facit saltus [2] (nature does not make jumps, ) is wrong as we know from quantum physics. [2, 3]
Bibliography:
- [1] http://www2.toyota.co.jp/en/vision/production_system/just.html
- [2] “However, as the basic structure of DNA is discrete, nature is now widely understood to make jumps at the biological level, if only on a very small scale.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natura_non_facit_saltus
- [3] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/quantum+jump
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Scrum Gathering Review Article from Brazil
November 11th, 2009 10:27 am · Events, Portuguese
A very nice article written by two brazilian speakers and participants of the Scrum Gathering in Munich em portugues on INFOQ.
Obrigados e cumprimentos ao Rafael Sabbagh e Marcos Garrido.
http://www.infoq.com/br/news/2009/11/scrum-gathering-alemanha
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Scrum and its success - 60000 CSMs
November 5th, 2009 04:16 pm · English, Good to know
Last week the Scrum Alliance published the number [1]. We are now more than 60000 Certified ScrumMasters. This year around 22000 ScrumMasters have been to classes and got the certification (of attendance). That is a bit more than last year, but not a jump like the years before.
So the market starts to consolidate! Bad news for everybody, who wants to jump on the rolling wagon now as consultant or trainer. It gets much harder to get you share in it!
On the other side. No market dump. The market for Scrum stays stable and that means it is a relative increase. If we assume that the rest of the IT and consulting market declined in 2009.
[1] Source: Internal Email to the CSTs by Howard Sublett.
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CSPO Class in Oslo
November 5th, 2009 04:08 pm · After a training, Product Owner, Scrum
Besides the fact that everything was against me, when I was in Oslo, the class was great! We discussed all relevant issues of being a Product Owner. Oslo has now 8 newly certified ScrumMasters. Congratulations!
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Last minute | CSM Trainings next week + Student seats
November 5th, 2009 12:43 pm · Scrum
There are 2 CSM Trainings next week:
Monday+Tuesday
9.+10.11. Vienna a german CSM class with ScrumCooking
Thursday+Friday
12.+13.11. Frankfurt an english CSM class
What we do regularly: Giving some seats to students.
SO ALL STUDENTS LISTEN RIGHT NOW:
I offer a FREE seat in Vienna and a FREE seat in Frankfurt in my CSM Training for a student. Be very well educated!
First come, first serve. Please send an email to kd(at)borisgloger.com.
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Some Gathering Links
November 2nd, 2009 08:31 pm · Scrum
Some interesting comments about the Scrum Gathering.
- Andy Brandt, Talks about some talks he attended [1]
- Armer Kater, [2]
[1] http://www.andybrandt.net/506/scrum-gathering-2009-day-three-and-final-comments/comment-page-1#comment-58182
[2] http://www.armerkater.de/2009/10/scrum-gathering-mnchen/
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Der klassische Projektmanager in Scrum
November 1st, 2009 08:37 pm · Scrum
… oder wie sich der klassische Projektmanager in Scrum auf die drei Rollen verteilt. Uwe Friedrichsen hat wunderschön und viel besser als ich es kann aufgeschrieben, wie sich die Rolle des Projektmanagers auf die drei Rollen PO, SM und Team verteilt. Sehr lesenswert.
[1] http://blog.codecentric.de/2009/10/der-klassische-projektmanager-in-scrum/
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CSM & ModT | November Trainings
October 30th, 2009 10:19 am · Scrum
Es gibt im November 3 Public Trainings für die noch Plätze gebucht werden können!
1) CSM Training mit Scrum Cooking (deutsch) in Wien - 9+10.11.
Diesmal im ehrwürdigen Palais Palffy mitten in Wien’s 1. Bezirk direkt neben der Hofburg. Natürlich mit ScrumCooking - ebenfalls im Palais.
2) CSM Training (english) in Frankfurt - 12+13.11.
Also for this training we’ve choosen a bit special place - the 25h hotel taylored by Levis. Very nice place in Frankfurt’s citycenter.
3) Fortbildung für ScrumMaster: Moderationstraining (deutsch) in München - 23+24.11.
Nach grossem Erfolg in Wien gibts das Moderationstraining mit Dieter Rösner diesmal in München! Direkt anmelden, es gibt nur eine kleine Gruppe!
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Remember The Future | Lowell Lindstrom | Scrum Gathering 2009
October 28th, 2009 09:40 am · English, Germany, Scrum, checked
Lowell Lindstrom gives an overview of “Remember The Future” Innovation Game played at the October 2009 Scrum Gathering in Munich. Co-facilitated by Lowell and Paul Culling, this game aimed to get ideas on how the Scrum Alliance could better serve the Scrum community.
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5 min on Scrum | Scrum and Design
October 27th, 2009 08:09 am · English, Organizational Scrum, Scrum, Software Development, checked
Interaction Design, User Centric Design, User Interface Experience and Scrum fits very well together if people who are in Scrum Teams stop thinking in GETTING IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME. The conflict that lies within the Interaction Design approach and Scrum [1] is the same conflict that we had in the software development industry since the beginning. If we know exactly how the result should be, than we can build it. Unfortunately this way of thinking creates a big problem: Speculation!
Scrum tried to solve all this: It is forbidden to have a prototype as a Sprint result. That you need a prototype for some causalities within a Sprint, ok. But not as a final result. Designers and developers need to work closely together within a Sprint. Stop believing you could or should know in details what you need to build in advance. Build it with the best ideas, check the result in the reality with the real thing and then do it again if you must.
[1] Interaction Design and Extreme Programming, http://stuq.nl/weblog/2009-02-11/interaction-design-and-extreme-programming
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“Level of Done” is not “Level of Professionalism”
October 26th, 2009 09:12 am · English, Methods, Organizational Scrum, Professional Software Delivery, Scrum, checked
Nothing is more misunderstood than the term “Level of Done” in Scrum. On the first glance Mitch [1] did a great job. And when I read this ideas a year ago I was flabbergasted. Wow - why did I had never worked with my teams on this. I must have been an idiot and I really wanted to implement these ideas in my consulting praxis. But I never did. I felt bad about this.
All people in the Scrum community around me, started to talk about the importance of the “Level of Done”, and how difficult it is to negotiate this with the Product Owner. I was again worrying. Do I do something wrong? Is it really possible not to work with your team on this? But something in me was blocked. On a sunny day in Vienna, sitting in my favorite breakfast location, it made suddenly “click!”
What people like Mitch [1], Dhaval [2] and Myank [3] sell as “Definition of Done” is not the “Definition of Done”. They found super cool ways to help people to determine on what maturity level either their developers can develop and/or at what maturity level the organization has established the code production.
To say it in more simple words: They found very nice ways to help development organizations to justify that they are not able to create potential shippable product increments at the end of a sprint. Sophisticated lists or even phrase like “Each team should collaborate and come up with the definition that suits its unique environment.” [3] are leading into the wrong direction. They make on one side transparent that this organization is not able to deliver potential product increments, but on the other side they do not help to change this.
Imagine a car manufacturer would tell his customers that the “Level of Done” he can produce is testable, without checks. The world of production does not work this way. They produce results.
“Level of Done” was never meant to be “Level of Professionalism”. Unfortunately it was understood this way. “Level of Done” was meant to tell to everybody on what level the product increment is ready. Finished on the developers machine, finished on the test machine, finished on the system integration machine, deployed to pre-production, or deployed to production. THIS WAS MEANT TO BE “LEVEL OF DONE”.
And this is the only thing you can negotiate with the PO. To talk about if we have “updated our architecture diagrams” or “operational procedure guides updated” [1] was not meant by this term.
It is very sad, that we in our industry really need to worry if teams do their jobs professionally. That Scrum Coaches need to help professional software developers to do their job was never the intention. But unfortunately we need to do this.
—
[1] Mitch Lacey, How do we know that we are done? http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/107-how-do-we-know-when-we-are-done
[2] Dhaval Pachal, What is the definition of Done? http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/105
[3] Myank Gupta, http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/106-definition-of-done-a-reference
[4] Michael Dubakov, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/170009/your-scrum-definition-of-done
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A game to bring Customers and Product Owners Together
October 25th, 2009 08:33 pm · English, Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumTools, checked
Tobias Mayer played with us an innovation game called Speedboat. This game helps people to work on new product ideas together. Have fun with this 5 minute video.
This game was invented by Luke Hohmann. And it is fun to play.
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RIA Summer Jam in München
October 23rd, 2009 10:57 am · Estimation, Events, Germany, Locations, Product Development, Scrum, Scrum Training, ScrumTools
[....] Weil der RIA Summer Jam 09 so schön war haben wir den Tag noch mal Revue passieren lassen und einige Eindrücke in Form von Texten und Bildern für euch zusammengestellt:
In der gelungenen Keynote mit dem Titel “Hilfe, Technik frisst Marke auf!”, präsentierte Boris Lakowski, wie mit Hilfe von Technik ein Mehrwert bzw. ein Wertverlust für Marken generieren lässt.
Unser Fazit: Technologie alleine bzw. als Selbstzweck macht im Zusammenspiel mit Marken (und auch sonst) wenig Sinn. Vielmehr eine intelligente und markengerechte Kombination beider Teile kann Mehrwerte im digitalen Umfeld schaffen. [...] [1]
[1] Mehr dazu findet ihr hier: http://www.fugmuc.de/ria-summer-jam-09-review_622.html
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Scrum Gathering | Interview with Brazil
October 22nd, 2009 03:28 pm · Scrum
During the Gathering we interviewed the participants from Brazil.
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Exclusive Sight-Seeing Tour around Munich in a Monstrous Hummer H2
October 15th, 2009 09:18 pm · Agile Planning, Events, Fun, Germany, Good to know, Locations, Scrum Meetings
You have travelled many miles to attend the Scrum Gathering in Munich? Why not use a break for a short but exciting sight-seeing tour around Munich?
And to make this experience even more interesting, how would you like the idea not to take a normal car or taxi – but to have a chauffeur drive you around Munich in an exclusive HUMMER H2!
All you have to do is to participate in our drawings. The odds to win are high, because our tours will take place during most breaks of all 3 gathering days – so have faith, contact our team members and participate. A great ride awaits you!
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How to Use Scrum Mixing Caipirinhas and Having Fun Drinking Them
October 15th, 2009 09:06 pm · Events, Fun, Germany, Good to know, Locations, Scrum
For all Scrum enthusiasts in Munich we have prepared an unusual appliance for Scrum on Tuesday evening.
Have you ever thought about all the different areas in life where you could use scrum to complete all kinds of tasks? One application we want to let you know is mixing cocktails, in this special case caipirinhas. OK, I admit that drinking them has nothing to do with Scrum, except that we can all relax a little bit after a long and laborious day at the gathering. The atmospheric Brazilian live music will hopefully do the rest. Looking forward to seeing you there!
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Your Free Beer Is Waiting for You at the Hofbräuhaus!
October 15th, 2009 08:51 pm · Deutsch, Events, Fun, Good to know, Scrum
The First 100 Beers are on me.
Are you attending the Scrum Gathering in Munich next week? Great, it’s going to be awesome. My team and I are planning some extraordinary events. For Monday, let’s meet at one of Munich’s oldest breweries, the Hofbräuhaus to get to know each other. And to let the conversations start easier – the first hundred beers are on me. So, make sure you are there on time to get your free beer. It’s waiting for you. My team and I can’t wait to see you all and to experience an interesting evening with you. For more information about where and when to meet – ask me or my team at the gathering.
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New Look
October 14th, 2009 08:00 am · Scrum
Surprise! Scrum4You has a new Look!
Hopefully you like it and find it more clearly layed out. You see the achievements of our third sprint. Up to now we’ve worked more on the backend, 3rd sprint brought a new theme. The website is still a Wordpress Blog but with some adhancements
We go on working, so some more cool stuff is ahead. Backlog isn’t empty…
And let us show one of the nastieest impediments: http://www.savethedevelopers.org/index.php
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Scrum Gathering … 7 days … and the Count Down continous
October 11th, 2009 03:11 pm · Scrum

I am totally busy with preparing the Scrum Gathering. We, the bor!sgloger team, have some surprises for you prepared. f.e. Jodok Batlog and I will give you an inside into one of the most successful Scrum Implementations. We have a funny game for you prepared … and of course we will have some cool drinks for you. … and more.
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The XP Days Tour Starts Tomorrow
November 22nd, 2009 12:27 pm · English, Good to know, Scrum, Scrum as Business
As every year the XP Day Wave starts in Belgium.[1] The XP Conference in Mechelen is always worth to go, as a lot of very experience people will show up. The program [4] is really promising and I would love to go “Visual Management for Agile Teams”[5]. Unfortunately for me, it turned out far to late that I do have time this week
The second stop of the XP Tour is in Germany, Karlsruhe [3]. The organizer from Andrena have put together an extremely nice conference program. All big names in the German agile business are there to show what the can. I thing the talk you must visit is “Scrum and Legacy” [6]. It looks very promising.
And later this year on 7 and 8 of December the mother of the XP Day runs in London [3]. Based on the program you can see that the new buzz word on the horizon is Kanban and Lean in the agile world. The XP day in London usually sets trends. So I we should not wonder if we do have much more Lean discussion ongoing next year.
[2] http://xpdays.de/2009/index.html
[4] http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/Program.html
[5] http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2009/sessions/Visual%20Management%20for%20Agile%20Teams.htm
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KnowledgeToGo | Rebecca Saxe | Mind Reading | TED
November 17th, 2009 08:19 am · Scrum
Rebecca Saxe, PhD [1], Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, did a wonderful talk about the behavior of kids in a moral riddle. She shows in this talk how kids learn the ability to read peoples mind and that the body builds this ability by creating a special area in the brain. It is very impressive to see that actually some people are simple not able to judge “correctly” because the brain is not capable to do it. Will we ever call this morally handicapped? I do not know.
It is a 16 min Video, that is worth to see and watch till the end. The interview is also amazing.
[1] http://bcs.mit.edu/people/saxe.html
[2] Picture from http://bcs.mit.edu/people/saxe.html
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Scrum Tools | 2009
March 1st, 2009 06:55 pm · Scrum, ScrumTools, checked
Scrum Tools are a topic that is very important for the readers of my blog. We will continue to write reviews every couple of weeks this year.
Scrum Tools | Reviews to date
- Agile Buddy
- Acunote
- Banana Scrum
- FireScrum
- Mingle
- ProjectCards
- Scrumy, Scrumy Pro
- ScrumDesk
- SpiraPlan
- Protonotes
- Taskboard
- tinyPM
- Version One
- XPlanner
- XPLive
About Tools
Other Scrum Tool Compilation Lists
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Scrum Tools | Agile Buddy | Review
February 16th, 2009 12:31 am · Scrum, checked
“Simplifying the Agile project management”. That’s the Agile Buddy catch phrase. As you can see Agile Buddy is a tool to manage agile project. It runs on the web and was developed by Brightspark. It has a good look and feeling, with the main features organized in tabs. There is a free trial available if you want to take a look at it before you buy it.
First Steps
To start using Agile Buddy we need to create a Product register, then you can start creating your backlog. There is no need to create releases or iterations upfront. You are free to create as many stories as you like with minimum data and fill that when it is more appropriate. It´s possible to define a great amount of information like source, business value or risk. These properties do not have much impact on the story progression into the project being just informative properties, but when it comes to the real deal (size, priority) Agile Buddy does have some little problems that are so common in most of the tools. Speaking first about the prioritization process, Agile Buddy brings us a range of 5 possible values to define a story priority, from blocker to minor. This will lead us to the well known problem of having different stories with the same priority, which can be OK if we talk about the bottom of a big backlog, but it’s definitively a problem to the stories on the top of the backlog, as I said in previous reviews a simple ordination will prevent this kind of problems. On the estimation feature, I enjoy the fact that the use of the word size defines the story estimate. Agile Buddy comes with an estimation screen that is useful on estimation meetings providing a quick way to estimate a great amount of stories. Another good point is the use of the Fibonacci-like scale, the most popular scale on agile projects, but unfortunately this feature isn’t problem free. The major problem is that you can only work on unestimated stories, so you can not alter the size of a story through this screen. If you need to do that you have to edit a story and then set a new size. The funny thing is on the story edit screen you can set nay value to the size, not limited by the Fibonacci scale, this is a bit confusing and should be fixed on future releases of the product.

Planning
On the planning part, Agile Buddy gives us two features, Release Planning and Iteration Planning. To be able to do your iteration planning you are obligated to do your release planning first. The release iteration is basically an assignment screen, where you can say which stories will be on the next release. There’s no much more of it, maybe the feature would get a real boost if you could access some information about the development teams capacity or the application could provide some sort of projections about how many iterations it’s going to take until the release is ready and how the decisions of putting in a story or not will affect the schedule. The iteration planning works the same way,you just need to choose which stories will be part of your iteration. The difference is that only stories that were previously assigned to be part of the release will be available this time. After assigning the stories it’s a good moment to create your tasks for each one of them. Unfortunately you have the leave the planning screen to do that and access the Task option on the Create menu and again you see another common problem. You have to estimate your task in hours. So if you don’t want to do that, you can use the idea of one-hour-to-everything, so you can have a burndown chart to show. At least you can create several tasks without having to access the Create menu again, this speeds up things a little, but it would be even better if you could do this in the story context.

Running a Sprint
There is no specific feature to use to update the tasks and stories status on a daily basis like a task board. The Track screen is the most close to this. There’s a track screen for the whole project, for the release and the iteration. On the release track, you can see release backlog with the status of the stories and a Story burnup chart, where you can see how many story points are completed during the release. On the iteration track you can see the selected product backlog (stories) with the sprint backlog (tasks) and a burndown chart to the task hours. You can also update the status of the end and the stories as well.
Conclusion
Although Agile Buddy is an easy to use and learning tool, it suffers from the same problems many tools do. Agile Buddy covers only basic features and doesn’t bring any innovation and maybe these features are not enough to justify their price, maybe on the next version.
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Product Backlog | Templates | Scrum Tools
July 1st, 2008 04:25 am · Scrum
- Henrik Knieberg allowed me to share his Version of an Excel Product Backlog template with you: Index Card Generator.
- Danielo Bardusco shared a very nice Excel based Product Backlog template with us: Danielos Barduscos Backlog Template.
- I got a very interesting case study from the Scrum Desk people: Scrum Desk Case Study.
- I forgot to mention the most impressive open source tool I found: FireScrum
- Bas Voode has also a Backlog Link collection.
- I found another Sprint Backlog Excel sheet: Excel Sheet - Sprint Backlog.
- A list of reviews of Scrum Tools
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KnowledgeToGo | Rebecca Saxe | Mind Reading | TED
November 17th, 2009 08:19 am · Scrum
Rebecca Saxe, PhD [1], Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, did a wonderful talk about the behavior of kids in a moral riddle. She shows in this talk how kids learn the ability to read peoples mind and that the body builds this ability by creating a special area in the brain. It is very impressive to see that actually some people are simple not able to judge “correctly” because the brain is not capable to do it. Will we ever call this morally handicapped? I do not know.
It is a 16 min Video, that is worth to see and watch till the end. The interview is also amazing.
[1] http://bcs.mit.edu/people/saxe.html
[2] Picture from http://bcs.mit.edu/people/saxe.html
→ 1 CommentTags:
Scrum and its success - 60000 CSMs
November 5th, 2009 04:16 pm · English, Good to know
Last week the Scrum Alliance published the number [1]. We are now more than 60000 Certified ScrumMasters. This year around 22000 ScrumMasters have been to classes and got the certification (of attendance). That is a bit more than last year, but not a jump like the years before.
So the market starts to consolidate! Bad news for everybody, who wants to jump on the rolling wagon now as consultant or trainer. It gets much harder to get you share in it!
On the other side. No market dump. The market for Scrum stays stable and that means it is a relative increase. If we assume that the rest of the IT and consulting market declined in 2009.
[1] Source: Internal Email to the CSTs by Howard Sublett.
→ 1 CommentTags:
“Level of Done” is not “Level of Professionalism”
October 26th, 2009 09:12 am · English, Methods, Organizational Scrum, Professional Software Delivery, Scrum, checked
Nothing is more misunderstood than the term “Level of Done” in Scrum. On the first glance Mitch [1] did a great job. And when I read this ideas a year ago I was flabbergasted. Wow - why did I had never worked with my teams on this. I must have been an idiot and I really wanted to implement these ideas in my consulting praxis. But I never did. I felt bad about this.
All people in the Scrum community around me, started to talk about the importance of the “Level of Done”, and how difficult it is to negotiate this with the Product Owner. I was again worrying. Do I do something wrong? Is it really possible not to work with your team on this? But something in me was blocked. On a sunny day in Vienna, sitting in my favorite breakfast location, it made suddenly “click!”
What people like Mitch [1], Dhaval [2] and Myank [3] sell as “Definition of Done” is not the “Definition of Done”. They found super cool ways to help people to determine on what maturity level either their developers can develop and/or at what maturity level the organization has established the code production.
To say it in more simple words: They found very nice ways to help development organizations to justify that they are not able to create potential shippable product increments at the end of a sprint. Sophisticated lists or even phrase like “Each team should collaborate and come up with the definition that suits its unique environment.” [3] are leading into the wrong direction. They make on one side transparent that this organization is not able to deliver potential product increments, but on the other side they do not help to change this.
Imagine a car manufacturer would tell his customers that the “Level of Done” he can produce is testable, without checks. The world of production does not work this way. They produce results.
“Level of Done” was never meant to be “Level of Professionalism”. Unfortunately it was understood this way. “Level of Done” was meant to tell to everybody on what level the product increment is ready. Finished on the developers machine, finished on the test machine, finished on the system integration machine, deployed to pre-production, or deployed to production. THIS WAS MEANT TO BE “LEVEL OF DONE”.
And this is the only thing you can negotiate with the PO. To talk about if we have “updated our architecture diagrams” or “operational procedure guides updated” [1] was not meant by this term.
It is very sad, that we in our industry really need to worry if teams do their jobs professionally. That Scrum Coaches need to help professional software developers to do their job was never the intention. But unfortunately we need to do this.
—
[1] Mitch Lacey, How do we know that we are done? http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/107-how-do-we-know-when-we-are-done
[2] Dhaval Pachal, What is the definition of Done? http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/105
[3] Myank Gupta, http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/106-definition-of-done-a-reference
[4] Michael Dubakov, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/170009/your-scrum-definition-of-done
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Trainings
May 1st, 2008 05:51 pm · Scrum
A 2 days ScrumMaster Training will clarify all aspects of Scrum. You will experience what Scrum really is.
Get to know the hard facts and the knowledge inbetween to have a clear understanding about how to implement Scrum in your projects. Listen to real world stories, who is using Scrum, how was it implemented, what are pitfalls to avoid. Get to know experiences from other participants and discuss your questions in teams. All this blended with far sighted views of how we will work together in the future - with the help of Scrum?
Read more: New Examination Process • Training Agenda DE
Certified ScrumMaster Class
14 December 2009 - 15 December 2009 | Munich, Germany
Location: Munich, Germany
Venue: TNG
Address: Betastraße 13a, 85774 Unterföhring, Germany
Trainer: Boris Gloger
Cost: 1400 Euro, excl. VAT
25 January 2010 - 26 January 2010 | Wien, Austria
Location: Wien, Austria
Venue: Palais Palffy
Address: Josefsplatz9 , 1010 Wien, Austria
Trainer: Boris Gloger
Cost: 1650 Euro, excl. VAT, incl. ScrumAlliance examination fee
08 February 2010 - 09 February 2010 | Munich, Germany
Location: Munich, Germany
Venue: TNG
Address: Betastraße 13a, 85774 Unterföhring, Germany
Trainer: Boris Gloger
Cost: 1400 Euro, excl. VAT
15 March 2010 - 16 March 2010 | Wien, Austria
Location: Wien, Austria
Venue: Lindner am Belvedere
Address: Am Rennweg 3, 1030 Wien, Austria
Trainer: Boris Gloger
Cost: 1650 Euro, excl. VAT
12 April 2010 - 13 April 2010 | Munich, Germany
Location: Munich, Germany
Venue: TNG
Address: Betastraße 13a, 85774 Unterföhring, Germany
Trainer: Boris Gloger
Cost: 1400 Euro, excl. VAT
A public training class does have a huge benefit. You work with people from different companies. You share a lot of experiences, you learn from different companies and you learn to know new people. If you don’t find a suitable date/place or if you are a firm/group of people who would like to have a inhouse training, please contact us directly office(at)borisgloger.com.
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A game to bring Customers and Product Owners Together
October 25th, 2009 08:33 pm · English, Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumTools, checked
Tobias Mayer played with us an innovation game called Speedboat. This game helps people to work on new product ideas together. Have fun with this 5 minute video.
This game was invented by Luke Hohmann. And it is fun to play.
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A [financial] pyramid scheme is a 