Recently, a couple of agile fellows and I discussed why we see many Scrum projects fail. Here are some reasons we witnessed or experienced ourselves during our work on so called Scrum projects. The purpose of this list which is by no means exhaustive is to help you avoid making the same mistakes when you start out using Scrum on your projects:

Adjusting Scrum to organizations instead of adapting the organization to Scrum
Adapting Scrum even before it is applied correctly
Blaming Scrum for the issues being surfaced (”Scrum does not work because …“)
Changing …

Season’s Greetings to the entire Scrum Community!
I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Thanks to my buddy Christian Schweizer for this amazing light painting. He made this photo with a digital camera, autotimer, long exposure and a pocket lamp. No image editing at all. Again, thanks Christian!

To read more about light painting, click here: http://www.diyphotography.net/painting_with_light

No need to comment on this:

If you like to learn why up-front planning does not work very well and how agile planning works instead, I highly recommend reading Mike Cohn’s “Agile Estimating and Planning“.

This is part 2 of “A retrospective about a dead Scrum Master”.  Click here to read part 1.

During his first days on the project, the Scrum Master silently observed the people and their activities on the project. He roamed the floors and worked the phones to connect with all the people working on the project. He learned that 16 people, most of them distributed across several locations (and time zones), had been working on the project for 6 months. He was told that only very little functionality has been …

Once upon in time, a Scrum Master was asked by a large company to help introduce Scrum in one of their most important and strategic projects. The Scrum Master asked for the company’s motivation to use Scrum and was told that a project which was kicked-off 6 months ago wasn’t showing much progress and that the bosses wanted to see results and that the deadline was already looming. So the project sponsors decided to adapt to a more promising approach about which they have heard good things – Scrum. If …

A couple of weeks ago I discussed a way to run Sprint retrospectives with the scrumdevelopment user group on Yahoo. I proposed to use the recent Sprint burn down chart during the Sprint retrospective as a guideline for the team: Instead of putting sticky notes with significant events on a rather abstract timeline representing the Sprint we put them directly on the respective Sprint burndown chart.
If you would like to know more, you may find a summary of the discussion on InfoQ: Tips to Improve Retrospectives.

Today I found a brilliant and emotional video promoting Agile over Waterfall on Boris Gloger’s blog Scrum 4 You. He posted it quite a while ago but actually it cannot be promoted often enough. It’s a great story about how software development could and should work. 8 minutes absolutely worth watching:

I found an interesting article written by Srikant Chellappa and Jerry Buchanan about how Scrum can be adapted to a globally distributed delivery model. It describes that Scrum, as a framework, can and needs to be adapted to your own global organizational environment.

At the time I was working on my CSP application, I found this terrific book written by Henrik Kniberg about his experience and lessons learned using Scrum and XP. You can download a free version of “Scrum and XP from the trenches” from InfoQueue.