Soon it will happen: the months that this year in our latitudes can only euphemistically be called “the good ole’ days of summer” – if you believe the augurs – will be here in less than two weeks.

In order to make sure summer succeeds in spite of rained out barbecues and damp evenings in the beer gardens, we are starting early on the 5th of July with our blog  “bor!sgloger Summer School.

For eight weeks on www.borisgloger.com we will  critically  contemplate central Scrum topics from diverse perspectives. We will use progress reports, case studies, many, many updates and tips to show that Scrum can be (and has been) used successfully in many seemingly unresolvable situations and naturally not just in software companies.

We especially want to have an open discussion with you. Please let us know during Summer School what questions, comments and experiences you are having with the various topics:  We will try to answer them directly and reward your most valuable contributions every week with a small present. ;-)

To end the week on Fridays  there will be a new cartoon from our  Scrumlies.  After all it is summer and the bor!sgloger Summer School is supposed to be fun ;-)

PS: Don’t worry, there won’t be any tests ;-)

On Monday, June 7th, I was able to take part in this year’s German-speaking Scrum Meeting at SAP’s in Walldorf.

Before the official opening at 10 a.m. there was enough time to talk to other participants. Apart from the announced participants there were many employees of SAP’s.

Christian Schmidkonz opened the event as the host and then gave the floor to Christoph Mathis who opened the market place.

After 45 minutes the participants had scheduled the program for the day and my own schedule was aöso now planned. The Open Space could start.

Program

It was the first time that I took part in an event of the deutschescrum User Group. The meeting was organized as an Open Space and I was curious what I was going to take home from there.

After a strenuous day with many conversations my feeling at the end of the day was that the day had been worth it. The spread of topics reached from team games (Marshmallow Challenge, Tightrope Walking) to the question of how to find the right architecture (Emergent Architecture) over to applying Scrum in big projects (Scaling Scrum Seriously).

Christoph Mathis’ moderation through the open space made sure the offered topics were well spread to the available rooms and also the presentation of the results in the evening was well led.

SAP as the host offered us nice rooms and excellent catering. Thank you for the big support for the German-speaking Scrum Community! Too bad that the furniture – as in most companies – was firmly installed, so that the Agile Teams, e.g. couldn’t gather round the flip charts so well.

I’m curious to see when the principle of Agility will be so established in companies that meeting rooms can be used more flexibly.

The results of the meetings will be collected in the Wiki http://scrumaufdeutsch.pbworks.com/.

Here you can find further information.

I had the pleasure last Friday to participate in the TNG Big Techday in Munich. It was a totally successful event with pleasant, diverse participants and exciting topics.

The presentation “Where do Software mistakes come from?” by Dr. Andreas Zeller [1] was especially memorable. It was a very amusing and interesting talk about the origins, discovery of and avoidance of bugs in software development.

Dr. Zeller clearly showed how to quickly find bugs by using “Delta Debugging”. He also showed how to identify problems by isolating various aspects of software specifically prone to mistakes . In conclusion, he explained how it is possible to correlate previously used codes and process properties with mistakes in order to avoid bugs. [2]

It has been a long time since I had so much fun with a bug…
Thank you Dr. Zeller!

Karoline Zufelde

[1] http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/zeller/
[2] http://www.whyprogramsfail.com/

5^th Scrum Meeting held in German: June 7^th, 2010, at SAPs in Walldorf

10 – 17h Open Space

Location: SAP AG, Walldorf

More information here: http://scrumaufdeutsch.pbworks.com

No matter what your expectations were before a conference like the ScrumDay, you ask yourself the question “What did I learn from the presentations and discussions after eight hours on the train and a long conference day?”

For me the highlight of the day was the presentation of Michael Kloss, Itemis. What became apparent through conversations with him (and could be detected from his presentation) – is that Michael is a spirited, courageous contemporary who is serious about Scrum and lives it consistently in projects with his own teams and clients.

The thing that made his presentation so special among a lot of very good ones was that it dealt with a topic which is a matter of course and yet underrepresented: the TEAM! Is Scrum about the many roles, the meetings, the coaching approaches, the best & worst practices, the tools and views or even performances? You could get this impression from the agenda of events like the ScrumDay and many others – maybe even from the business jargon. Or isn’t it the TEAM which is the at the center of attention? The perspectives and insights from Michael Kloss’ presentation have made me think and given me a new task: Scrum is made for  teams, – tools, processes, role models, change processes, trainings and whatnot are subsidiary, they are supposed to help and support.

The point are the teams – maybe now more than ever – are allowed to self-organize with good conditions in order to realize their visions (PO) and potentials (management) that we create in business with their skills and expertise.

On May 5th Jürgen Margetich, Head of Sales, and Joachim Legat, Head of Marketing, will represent the bor!sgloger Team at the Scrum Day 2010 in Munich.

If you happen to be there, too, and want to talk to us, just contact us beforehand so we can arrange a time to meet:

juergen.margetich@borisgloger.com
joachim.legat@borisgloger.com

or give us a call: +43 (699) 18177941

See you the day after tomorrow! :-)

Today the ScrumGathering in Orlando, Florida has started. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Johnson began and they have been talking about Scrum and CMMi. It’s a pity that a keynote has been used at a ScrumGathering to compare Scrum to CMMi. On the other hand I have been right again: I’m writing about it for years that both issues are related.

But… I think that the ScrumGathering needs different keynotes. We have a community of people who have declared that they would like to change the “world of work”. To accomplish this we need other keynote speakers, like: Ricardo Semler or Tom Peters.

The next session was the “Deep Dive” session. A few topics: Lee Devin: Artful Making; Luke Hohmann, Innovation Games; Lisa Attkins, Coach the Coach; and others that have been very educational. A lot has been known already, but there have been some new and good approaches.

The “get-together” in the evening has been a lot of fun. Many people have been talking excitedly with each other.

It was exciting too that the German trainer and coaching scene is interacting very  constructively in my opinion. We can look forward to what the future will have in store.

Vienna has 22 new ScrumMasters! The training was conducted in the Hotel Triest [1], a wonderful venue. Robin Williams and Anastasia have also stayed in this cool hotel. (Unfortunately not at the same time we were there.)

I want to use this opportunity to thank all attendees for the wonderful time we had together.

See you at the next Scrum Cooking in March!

[1] http://www.dastriest.at/

Further education for ScrumMasters in Munich possible.
As a starter for the Professional ScrumMaster program (Completely new! More about it in a couple of days) a facilitation training for ScrumMasters takes place in Munich on 1+2 February.