InfoQ and the Roots of Scrum

The JAOO Conference is coming up next week in Denmark. This is one of the leading annual software developer conferences and highly recommended. Last year, I presented at the JAOO conference on the Roots of Scrum. It was a great conference with about 900 Java and .NET developers in attendance.

InfoQ has just put up a video of the entire Roots of Scrum presentation along with slides that synchronize with the video. Very cool!

The Roots of Scrum marketing pitch on InfoQ concerning Kent Beck, Scrum, and XP is somewhat exaggerated. In the presentation, I discuss the email Kent sent me in 1995 when he requested materials on Scrum. He was certainly aware of Scrum and particularly the Takeuchi and Nonaka 1996 Harvard Business Review paper mentioned in the Roots of Scrum video. XP, however, focuses on engineering practices which are quite useful to Scrum teams. While the first Scrum team used all of what became XP engineering practices in some form, an early decision was made with Ken Schwaber to focus industry-wide rollout of Scrum on team, project management, and scaling issues. As a result, Scrum as a way to manage and scale teams is nicely complementary, yet not overlapping, to XP engineering practices. The highest performing development teams tend to use both Scrum and XP at once as you will notice in my recent paper on the SirsiDynix project.

Next Wednesday at JAOO, I will talk about Scrum Tuning. How do you make your Scrum implementation better and what are best practices observed when watching hyperproductive Scrum teams in action? This will be followed by a two day Scrum certification course at the conference. This CSM course has been sold out for months so those of you who would like to become a Certified ScrumMaster in Denmark should take a look at the October 25-26 CSM Course in Aarhus which will follow the JAOO conference. Contact Anne Sophie Bille at EOS: asb@eos.dk.