SCRUM at Google (speaker Jeff Sutherland)

SCRUM has some of its roots in the Toyota Way of doing business and building things as well as a Harvard paper by some Asian named people whose names I forgot to write down but you all know how to Google, right?

There is a lot of overlap with the Agile Manifesto and SCRUM is regarded as an Agile methodology that is continuously motivating (“bootstrapping”) people to excel when called upon to perform great deeds. So it is also a lot about empowerment.

SCRUM was incrementally introduced at Google, so the engineers discovered themselves what was not going as well as they thought or should I say hoped.

There are Standup Meeting periodically, sometimes daily or weekly or even monthly. Whatever suits your needs and your team is ready for. Jeff suggested that a Standup Meeting should be about 15 minutes where the team looks back on the pas 12 hours and into the next 12 hours of development as this will keep everybosy focused on feasible goals. The agenda usually contains 3 items: to do, done, and issues.

XP is a great addition to SCRUM because it adds engineering principles and best practices that engineers can use in the SCRUM process.

Some things I want to look into, that Jeff mentioned, are: The ABCs of SCRUM, the Nokia Scrum Assessment.

This was really a great session and if SCRUM only half as much empower people as Jeff did with his audience than it is worth a try.