Save Our Scrum

Preface

1. A Brief Timeline
2. Scrum In the Wild
3. Above My Pay Grade

How To Use This Book

1. Problem of Audience
2. Part One - Simply Scrum
3. Part Two - Scrum Nuggets
4. Part Three - Case Studies
5. Part Four - The Back Matter

Scrum as a Framework for improvement… and that’s it

1. Scrum Roles
2. Scrum Rituals
3. The Secret Sauce of Scrum

Why Scrum?

1. Limiting Work in Progress
2. Prioritizing Work
3. Restricting Changes in a Sprint
4. Building It and Communicate about It
5. Discussing about What Went Right and Wrong, and What to Change
6. What is the Value of Scrum?

Common Problems

1. The Whirlwind
2. The Compression Problem
3. The Tailoring Problem
4. The Assumptions Problem
5. From Problems to Solutions
6. A Few Solutions
7. A Real Example
8. Review: New Terms

Scrum Nuggets

1. The Nuggets Enumerated

Mechanics of Scrum Adoption (or failure to adopt Scrum)

1. Avoid Scrum As Waterfall
2. Avoid Scrum As Mini-Waterfall
3. What about done criteria? Team has done criteria but does not stick to nor change them.
4. Daily Standup: It’s not about status
5. Command and Control, Go Away. Come back to our competitors on another day.
6. Changes in Priority Even During a Sprint
7. Everything is urgent - not time to learn. Or even think.
8. Dealing with True Scrum Impediments
9. Beware Shallow Agreement
10. The value, and need, for a Scrum Master
11. The Scrum Master Course

Attitude

1. “We can’t do that”
2. Notice and Overcome Work Avoidance
3. Don’t Say “Demotivated”
4. “That’s not my job”
5. Don’t be a Victim
6. Everything is negotiable
7. There is no ‘They’

Scrum Master

Product Owner

1. Stories are too big
2. Slice Stories More Thinley To Create Predictability
3. Stories are not well defined
4. Stories with acceptance criteria that are technical = describing how the team has to implement
5. Stories with no big picture = stories are not grouped in epics, no context
6. Too many stories stuck in “waiting”, blocked outside the team
7. The Product Owner as Team Member
8. The product owner as architect
9. Product Ownership can be lonely

Code and Design

1. Developing a prototype
2. The risks of prototyping
3. Spikes and Prototypes
4. Technical Spikes
5. Use Tracer Bullets through your system
6. Dev/Tester Programming
7. Mobbing as a coaching method
8. One more call for Pair Programming

Testing

1. No Test Team
2. No Test Role
3. Testers Embedded on the Team
4. Whole Team Testing
5. Test Tooling as a Product Requirement
6. Test Tooling Below The GUI
7. System Integration Test Environment: It’s a Trap!

Engineering and Process (in the TPS sense)

1. Developing time to go faster
2. Limit Work In Progress (WIP)
3. Consider Touch Time
4. Multitasking
5. Find and Elevate the Bottleneck
6. Silos in teams get their own stories each sprint.

Environment

1. What Are Sprints For?
2. When The Official Process Process Gets In Your Way
3. Try Having a Physical Scrum Board
4. One Backlog of Work
5. Tasks Are Harmful
6. No, Seriously, Tasks are Bad, Don’t Do Them

Management Science

1. Things, Process, and Money
2. Big Teams Hurt. So Why Do That?
3. We need coordination between teams — no really.
4. Standardize Communication Interfaces, Not the How Of The Work
5. Streams of Work Teams, Not Portfolios of Projects
6. The Entire Role of Line Management Is Different
7. The line manager as Product Owner
8. Even better the line manager as Product Owner and team member
9. Impediment Remover or enabler of victim-mentality?

Change Management

1. “Process” is Superficial
2. Are you judged by feelings or results?
3. How is your transference rate?
4. Your Reality Bubble
5. Understand the risks involved in a change
6. Priority Whiplash
7. The Tailoring Problem
8. Communities of Practice, Not Centers of Excellence
9. Many people are faking it
10. People Hate Change