This review was written by Luciano Félix in portuguese and translated to english. The orginal text can be accessed here.
After losing my flight, thanks to the heavy rains in Recife, I get straight from the airport to the first Scrum Gathering Brazil with great expectations. Everything was very well organized. The Hyatt hotel was a great venue to the gathering. I’d like to congratulate JimCundiff, Jodi Gibson and Alexandre Magno for very successful event.
Project Management as a Strategic Competency - Ricardo Vargas, PMI
I believe Ricardo faced some disadvantages because a great part of the agile community doesn’t get along with the PMI and Ricardo didn’t have a deep knowledge about Scrum, so I think because of that he took a more political and defensive strategy. On his presentation Ricardo said that thePMBOK should not be followed blindly, that’s is just an umbrella, a set of what they think are good management practices and should not be used by the book. “ThePMBOK doesn’t born to be respected”, he said. We noticed an attempt from the PMI to get closer to agile process, creating study groups and awarding paper about it. Ricardo insisted in the idea that the Scrum and the PMBOK have the same goal, deliver value to the customer, sincerely I don’t know any process that want to do the opposite, the goal may be the same, but the chosen path is quite different and it’s get clear when someone asked about the project management importance and the idea of self-organized teams. Ricardo told us that he still sees the PM as something essential to the project success and that he doesn’t believe in self-organized teams. Even with the differences I believe and can’t close ourselves to the PMBOK completely, the dialogue is always important.
Contracts and Scrum: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - José Papo, BRQ
Jose Papo did a very good talk about contract models, which he called, Good (Open Scope), Bad (Close Scope) and Ugly (Progressive acquisition and by Metrics). Papo shows a great knowledge about the matter, discussing the upsides and downsides of each model, how to apply them, how to workaround the demands of a closed scope contract. It was really interesting, lately I talked to him about the metrics contract, basically function points, and how they will match with the team estimation. It really worth a look.
Virtual Keynote - Ken Shwaber, Scrum Alliance
Unfortunately I couldn’t watch too much form Ken’s Keynote because my presentation would be immediately after Ken’s. He begin with some Scrum concepts and talk a little about Scrumbut. At this I had to leave, but I knew that he perform an activity o illustrate the difference between a command-and-control culture and the idea of self-organization, but the polemic arose when he announced a certification to developers, CSD, Certified Scrum Developer, focusing on engineering techniques, what causes the polemic was the decision to uses Microsoft tools to support the certification.
Using the DoD to improve the product quality - Gustavo Coutinho, Provider e Luciano Félix, Especializa
To start I was very surprised with the amount of people how attended our talk, at least 80 people were there, i was really happy. Gustavo and I tried to show why is so important to have a good and visible definition of done and what kind of benefits it can bring to the project quality. Gustavo also presents how the ProviderSistemas are using the DoD and which king of gains they are getting since. At the end of the session we get a lot of question, that we hope we have answered satisfactorily. We also get a great feedback from a lot o people after the talk and we were able to extended the discussion on the breaks, no doubt it was a great experience.
The challenges to scale Scrum - Danilo Bardusco, Globo.com
Danilo shows how the Globo.com scaled Scrum on the projects they have, He talk about the initial difficulties, which strategies they used to implement the necessary changes.Danilo let it clear the importance to apply good engineering techniques and implement the management within the teams. I will say it again, is incredible how the Scrum culture merge in theGlobo.com DNA.
Creating a Scrum User Group – Igor Macaúbas, Provider
Arriving for the second day, I went straight to the Palm I room to help Igor set everything to his
presentation. Igor did a great job and his presentation deserved to be watched by more people.
He showed a little bit about the Recife Scrum User Group background, which challenges we faced on the beginning, the ideas that worked, that didn’t worked, etc. It’s interesting to see that the group are becoming a source of information about Scrum, not only in Recife, but nationally too. Besides that, Igor have been contacted by professionals from different locations and having the recognition from JimCundiff himself.
How to present Scrum to the customer – Fabiano Milani, Adaptworks
Fabiano’s presentation was not exactly what I was expecting, but was very interesting anyway. He shown how Adaptworks sells the Scrum idea to their customers. Fabiano insist on the importance that the customer understand how Scrum works so he can have a better dialogue with the supplier. I completely agree.
Good things and bad things on our Scrum adoption – Paulo Silveira, Caelum
Paulo’s keynote was really short, he shown a little bit about the Scrum training evolution on Caleum, before and after Alexandre became a CST e and little about the difficulties they faced on the Scrum adoption. The motto was that Scrum is easy to understand but hard to implement.
Game Development with Scrum – Diego Asfora
Unfortunately I didn’t see the beginning of Diego’s presentation, but I saw that he presented his experience as a mobile game developer when he was working on C.E.S.A.R.. Diego talked the problems he had to create multi-functional teams and get them to plan he sprints together, specially when it concern tests, always tricky when it comes to mobile applications.
6 Secrets for running to a good retrospective – Boris Gloger
As expected the room was crowded and even tough I already knew most of the content is always nice to see Boris in action. He started discussing about the human learning process e how we already use the retrospective concept on many areas of human knowledge. Boris showed how important retrospective really are and gave some very useful advices. I really worth a look.
After Boris presentation, We had to leave to no loose our flight and we end up not seeing a final round table, but with no doubt I was a great event. The opportunity to meet a lot of people from different places, exchange experiences and participate on debates was incredible. See you on the next Scrum Gathering.
Ich habe schon einmal von einem meiner Lehrer erzählt: Dieter Rösner. Zusammen mit Herrn Mantz ist er mein Trainer bei der Coaching Ausbildung der Contrain Gmbh. Die Contrain GmbH bietet diese vom 
Thanks to Vaclav Stoupa, organizer of the WebExpo 2009 in Praha in October this year. The Certified ScrumMaster class was a big success in Lipno this week. Not only because we trained 16 new people as CSMs, but because of the great fun we had. A lot of wonderful questions, a lot of very very good insights into the problems of companies in Czech Republic and a very good interaction between the people in the class. (the picture is stolen from: Clubcanada.eu - A hotel in Lipno)
In the middle of a Sprint a ScrumMaster will ask his team if they are going to meet their commitment. And I have to say, well it looks great. I will meet my Sprint Goals and I will have all 4 maior and all other important stories done.
The Sprint Review is about Results and what is to improve on these results. These are the things I achieved during this week:
Two weeks ago, I was in Recife, Brazil at an university that has a program for Software Engineering. Sponsored by Silvio L. Meira - Ph.D, Chief Scientist, CESAR and Professor, Federal University of Pernambuco, the team that created FireScrum did a very nice Sprint Review. I was exited. It is still not a tool, that can beat competitors like ScrumWorks, or Version One, but they do have some very nice ideas. And it is open source. So if you want, you can help them to work on it!
24 pages pure Scrum — The orange Scrum checklist!
Es ist fertig!!!! Ihr könnt Euch gar nicht vorstellen wie viel Arbeit in einer 2. überarbeiteten Auflage stecken können.
Boris: That means you work on a daily basis with the Team?
It was fantastic to be in Ouro Preto, Brazil. It is a lovely village in the hills between Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro:
