Thursday, September 20, 2007

Certified ScrumMaster Training - Day 1

So my buddy Jimmy and I are in Austin right now taking a Certified ScrumMaster course by Mark Pushinksy.

I’m ecstatic to be earning this certification, and while I won’t be getting a “Get out of my way, I’m a ScrumMaster” T-Shirt, I am getting incredibly valuable, practical Scrum training from two experts.

Excellent Quotes from today:

Mark (trainer): So what do you see in the Waterfall model that you don’t see in the agile model?
Guy: You mean “Waterfail” ??

Mark (acting as a troubled PM who hasn’t seen any results in 7 months): Well, I need ALL of those features. They are all important.
Jeff Palermo: What if I told you that your budget was reduced to 1/10th of what it is now. What would be most important then?
Mark: Umm, well all that is important. I need it ALL.
Jeff Palermo: Ok, so if I could give you something in 30 days, what would you like to see first?
Mark: You can give me something in 30 days?!?!?!

This dialog was very valuable to me.

Mark: You can’t heal, what you can’t feel. (not going to sell agile if they aren’t already feeling pain with current process)

Here are some notable points:

If you tell a customer that it’s going to take 12–18 months to deliver his software, what kind of features do you think he’s going to ask for? He’s going to think “Well if I’m not going to get it for over a year, I better get the everything and the kitchen sink!” Contrast this with telling the customer that you can deliver in 30 days, what is most important?
Scrum demands transparency on the project. Why would some people resist this? Lack of trust, Fear of failure (or appearing as a failure).
Shu, Ha, Ri (martial arts terms — Learning the Rules, Applying the Rules, Adapting and Combining the Rules)
Waterfall separation of analyst, architects, developers, testers breeds lack of trust. In the extremem these groups become “enemies” — Ever heard “ Oh if we ever got good requirements we could deliver” — or “the developers are delivering tons of bugs to us! What are they doing?!?!”
Agile/Iterative teams self-organize and fill needed roles to meet the sprint goal – this fosters trust between team members
The class had some trinkets and creativity toys which I thought was a nice touch to break the monotony of sitting in the same place for a long time
There were many hands on activities, many requiring us to stand up. These were awesome!
Think of scrum as a snowman. The head is the daily activity (24 hrs), the middle section is the sprint (2–4 weeks) and the base is the release plan (3–6 months)
Don’t make squirrel burgers (don’t deliver software that is low quality. Low quality means sloppy code, no unit tests, any corner-cutting.)

Role of Scrum Master