Agile Scrum Quotes

Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

We practice mastering ourselves in the moment so that we can better open ourselves to being a servant leader and to harness our emotions and choose what to do with our reactions.

If you don’t collect any metrics, you’re flying blind. If you collect and focus on too many, they may be obstructing your field of view.

Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up. —Michael J. Gelb

Alignment is a force multiplier.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

One of the Scrum rules is that work cannot be pushed onto a team; the Product Owner offers items for the iteration, and the team pulls as many as they decide they can do at a sustainable pace with good quality.

Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.

every Scrum team needs a ScrumMaster.

Another way of looking at it might be to say that scrum doesn’t actually do anything; people do things.

when agile projects fail, it’s often because of cultural and philosophical differences between waterfall and agile methodologies.

To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible.

The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem. —Theodore Rubin

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Un mal comienzo provoca un mal final” Eurípides

But for those that have not already attained mastery, structure and doctrine are needed because formlessness is useless to the beginner.

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions.

Stubbornness pays! We tend to think that it doesn’t, we might be hesitant to be stubborn – however only the stubborn succeed.

A ScrumMaster’s role on the team is compared to a sheepdog. They guide the team toward the goal by enforcing boundaries, chasing off predators, and giving the occasional bark.

To be full of love and enthusiasm for your work is a prerequisite for collaboration, a professional obligation;

If you have a problem and to solve it you need someone else to change, you don’t understand your problem yet

Thriving in today’s marketplace frequently depends on making a transformation to become more agile.

If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.

Potentially shippable is defined by a state of confidence or readiness, and shipping is a business decision.

By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum's values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent.

Frame your problem statements into actionable tasks and goals that lead to a solution. Problem statements incite procrastination and resistance whereas solution statements inspire hope and motivation.

Situational leadership articulates that effective leaders are the ones able to change their behavior according to the situation at hand. It identifies leadership styles relevant to specific situations.

Summary of Scrum vs Kanban Similarities: - Both are Lean and Agile - Both use pull scheduling - Both limit WIP - Both use transperency to drive process improvement - Both focus on delivering releasable software and often - Both are based on self-organizing teams - Both require breaking the work into pieces. - In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity/lead time)

Doing scrum” is as meaningless (and impossible) as creating an instance of an abstract class. Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction. It is not a process and it is not prescriptive.

The MVP has just those features considered sufficient for it to be of value to customers and allow for it to be shipped or sold to early adopters. Customer feedback will inform future development of the product.

A maxim in the theater tells us this: On time is already late (Devin 2009). That is, if we arrive at work on time with our bodies only, having not groomed our minds to collaborate, we are simply late. Unprepared.

Large and small companies employed “agile” and “scrum” procedures that gave clueless managers a way to discipline and control engineers whose work they could neither reproduce independently nor competently evaluate.

So, why do we do development work in these short cycles? To learn. Experience is the best teacher, and the scrum cycle is designed to provide you with multiple opportunities to receive feedback—from customers, from the team, from the market—and to learn from it.

Scrum is about whole people, not about skills. Scrum is not I, but We. It is about sharing, learning, continuous improvement, vibrant interaction, passionate collaboration, and personal growth. Scrum is about tribes, it is about building community. Each tribal member needs a sense of belonging, a personal quest.

I noticed a bumper sticker that said, simply, "gravity works." yes it does. Rock climbers know this and plan for it. So do agile coaches. I use this metaphor to illustrate that, in our physical environment, somethings are simply taken as a given. Constant. Always present. Undeniable. So, too, in our work environment.

One of the kindest services a scrum master can do for his or her team and for the organization as a whole is to create transparency—to radiate information. Transparency allows us to see flaws, and when we see the flaws we can make the choice to do something about them. We can stop being victims of process and start being warriors of change.

While it is not unheard of, most sane people would be embarrassed to take an introductory martial arts class and then develop their own “martial art” from it and teach it to unsuspecting students, exposing them to the danger of miscalculating their effectiveness at defending themselves in a critical situation. Yet agile practitioners do this every day ― some do not even feel any sense of shame for calling themselves “agile coaches” after a year of practical experience.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum’s built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement—which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage.

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

Plan-driven development works well if you are applying it to problems that are well defined, predictable, and unlikely to undergo any significant change. The problem is that most product development efforts are anything but predictable, especially at the beginning. So, while a plan-driven process gives the impression of an orderly, accountable, and measurable approach, that impression can lead to a false sense of security. After all, developing a product rarely goes as planned. For many, a plan-driven, sequential process just makes sense, understand it, design it, code it, test it, and deploy it, all according to a well-defined, prescribed plan. There is a belief that it should work. If applying a plan-driven approach doesn’t work, the prevailing attitude is that we must have done something wrong. Even if a plan-driven process repeatedly produces disappointing results, many organizations continue to apply the same approach, sure that if they just do it better, their results will improve. The problem, however, is not with the execution. It’s that plan-driven approaches are based on a set of beliefs that do not match the uncertainty inherent in most product development efforts.

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

Cynefin framework

Iterative development acknowledges that we will probably get things wrong before we get them right and that we will do things poorly before we do them well

Incremental development is based on the age-old principle of “Build some of it before you build all of it.

The biggest drawback to incremental development is that by building in pieces, we risk missing the big picture (we see the trees but not the forest).

Scrum is particularly well suited for operating in a complex domain. In such situations our ability to probe (explore), sense (inspect), and respond (adapt) is critical.

The sweet spots for Kanban are the software maintenance and support areas.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything,

Scrum provides the means to work incrementally, to bring the product to life step by step,

software development is full of unknowns;

software development is full of unknowns; uncertainty and risk go hand in hand with innovation.

innovation requires dedication, hard work, and discipline.

In Scrum, we don’t work on a phase at a time; we work on a feature at a time.

Through collaborative problem-solving approaches, human capital is turned into an individual sense of ownership.

leaders are also representatives of company policies, processes, and procedures.

Planning ... is a quest for value,

So, in Scrum, we are acutely aware that finding the bottlenecks in the flow of work and focusing our efforts on eliminating them is a far more economically sensible activity than trying to keep everyone 100% busy.

Lamentablemente las estadísticas muestran que los proyectos software tardan, en promedio, un 120% más del tiempo previsto inicialmente y que el costo final resulta ser un 100% más elevado que el que se calculó en la primera estimación.

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management—testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes.

global virtual high performance teams revolve around four concepts: (1) relationships, (2) accountability, (3) networking, and (4) leadership.

Relationships are of keen interest to successful team managers

product owners felt more confident, more able to influence, more visible, better organized, and better motivated in the new role

The product owner must have enough authority and the right level of management sponsorship

Product owners should spend at least one hour per day with their teams in the team room.

The ScrumMaster supports the product owner and team, protects the team and the process,

One individual should never be both ScrumMaster and product owner.

Starting with too many people causes products to be overly complex, making future product updates time-consuming and expensive.

the product vision was lost amid the many handoffs.

The Product Owner is the one and only person responsible for managing the Product Backlog

The product owner is a visionary who can envision the final product and communicate the vision.

As an entrepreneur, the product owner facilitates creativity;

you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.

The Product Owner plans, composes, distributes, and tracks work from his or her level down....

Scrum allocates up to 10% of the team’s capacity in every sprint for supporting the product owner

The decision to go agile at Salesforce.com grew out of a desire to create shorter more predictable releases.

Customer needs and product attributes are at the heart of the vision and deserve close attention.

Plan, Do, Check, and Act

Using feature teams rather than component teams whenever possible will reduce the need for pipelining.

Avoid a big-bang release—shipping

Cohesiveness is defined as a strong sense of connectedness among team members that causes them to work together to attain an objective.

Create a product road map once the product has been successfully introduced into the marketplace.

focus on the next 6 to 12 months rather than predicting the next two to three years.

inspect and adapt.

Do your products follow shared goals?

Salesforce.com experienced an amazing 97% increase in the number of features delivered by establishing short, steady release cycles.

Keep your eyes on the results, not the technologies

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The theory is that the people who do the work are the highest authorities on how best to do it.

A vision is a picture of where you want to get to, not the path to get there.

Try” masks the intent and carries an element of implicit failure in the message.

Thinking Alert: Drop the “try.” It does not add anything to the communication.

The second word often used without understanding the implication is “should.” ‘Should” has a flavor of admonition, guilt, and manipulation, especially when other people are using it by blurting out-loud a general statement with the word “should.” For example: “You should always finish what you’re eating and never leave anything on the plate.” Also: “This should have been completed by now.” And yet another: “You should not get up before the manager has left.” For example, Tina writes: Tina answers, “We should focus on production levels because this is what is driving the transfer to production; trust me, I’ve been here and have seen these projects many times.” In this case, Tina is using “should” to reprimand the team and also to have it her way by defining an imaginary rule and enforcing it upon the team.

Actually, what Tina is saying is, “I want to focus on production levels.” Many times, people use “should” instead of “I want”; this is the case with parents and children. The admonition of, “You should be nice” is actually saying, “I want you to be nice.

People use the word “should” to mask their wish or need. Instead of directly stating what they want, they construct a stipulation without naming a person responsible for carrying it out.

Thinking Alert: Monitor the “shoulds” in your teams. They are barriers to effective communication and reduce the potential power of the team.

A ScrumMaster who takes teams beyond getting agile practices up and running into their deliberate and joyful pursuit of high performance is an agile coach.

it’s universally important to understand the people on the team, how they work together, and how each person’s work impacts everyone else.

Working with a product backlog does not mean that the Scrum team cannot create other helpful artifacts, including a summary of the various user roles, user story sequences to model workflows, diagrams to illustrate business rules, spreadsheets to capture complex calculations, user interface sketches, storyboards, user interface navigation diagrams, and user interface prototypes. These artifacts do not replace the product backlog but instead should elaborate and explain its content. And keep things simple. Only use artifacts that help the Scrum team move closer to a shippable product.

Most software engineers are driven by pride of workmanship: we want to deliver products that we can stand behind, and that satisfy our users’ needs.