Scrum - the art of doing twice the work in half the time - Jeff Sutherland, J.J. Sutherland

• Strategy and Delivery

  • 80% of value / 20% of features

  • [Delivering a scope that has been offered in agile] Oh, you want a laser-guided system now? Well, that’s 50 points of work—to compensate for that addition, let’s drop 50 points of low-priority features from the bottom of the Backlog.

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  Implementation and Planning

  • putting together a Backlog and a team.

  • put together a road map of where you think things are going. What do you think you can get done this quarter? Where do you want to be this year?

  • don't overplan, just estimate.

  • The reason for doing this type of planning is to create transparency within the organization.

  • everything is being done in the open. Anyone can see where your product is at any time.

  The Scrum Process (EduScrum & Government)

  • Their Sprints are usually four or five weeks long, ending with a test.

  • [a government in island working on the constitution] so they formed a constitutional committee, which decided to use Scrum.

  • Each week the committee would meet, decide on one section of the document, and deliver it to the public every Thursday.

  • they’d collect feedback

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  Systems and Incentives

  • Contracts are awarded, money is made, and power is conferred by “whom you know,” not by “what you bring.”

  • it’s pointless to look for evil people; look instead for evil systems.

  • “What is the set of incentives that drives bad behavior?”

  • As they say on Wall Street, if you don’t know who the sucker in the room is, you’re the sucker.

  • fundamentally, humans want to be great. People want to do something purposeful

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  Corporate Culture: Microsoft vs. Valve

  • this giant pyramid with Bill at the top.

  • Except for Gabe Newell’s group. There were a few hundred

  • How do they get other people to work with them on it? They convince them.

  • All the hundreds of desks at Valve have wheels. As people start to work together on a project, they literally vote with their desks,

  • if they can’t convince anyone else it’s a good idea, maybe it really isn’t.

  • instead of having the luxury of having someone tell you what to do,

  • not performing up to the high Valve standards. Normally, other team members wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior,["let team decide & hire"]

• Autonomy and Individual Drive

  • the person doing the work is the one who decides how it’s done.

  • The person closest to the work knows best.

  • Scrum is about giving people the freedom to make their own decisions.

  • The best way to get people to do great work is to give them the autonomy to do it.

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  Waste and Multitasking

  • Multitasking makes you stupid.

  • The cost of context switching is huge.

  • Doing more than one thing at a time means doing none of them well.

  • Working long hours is not a sign of hard work; it’s a sign of a failing system.

  • If you find yourself working seventy or eighty hours a week, you’re not being productive; you’re being slow.

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  Team Dynamics and Happiness

  • Happiness is a leading indicator of performance.

  • Don't just fix the work; fix the way the team feels about the work.

  • Small teams work better than large ones.

  • The "Rule of Seven": once a team gets larger than seven, speed drops.

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  Planning and Estimates

  • Stop planning for years; start planning for Sprints.

  • We are terrible at estimating time, but we are great at estimating relative size.

  • Use Fibonacci numbers for story points.

  • The goal is not to be busy; the goal is to be finished.

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  Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)

• Kaizen: change for the better.
• At the end of every Sprint, ask: "What can we do better in the next one?"
• Pick one thing to change. Just one.
• The Sprint Retrospective is the most important meeting in Scrum
• The Daily Stand-up: fifteen minutes to synchronize.
• Three questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Is there any obstacle?

• Fixing a bug later costs 24 times more than fixing it now.