Last night I returned from a three day Scrum Master training course led by Mishkin Berteig, one of only two certified trainers in Canada. I found it interesting that my employer's existing non-formal development processes will make it MUCH easier to implement Scrum than everyone else who attended the course. Much of what we do already can be refined and made consistent to become Agile and the Scrum way. For example, releasing changes to customers every few weeks. The companies my colleagues work for have hierarchies of sign-offs, waterfall like processes, and way more paperwork than I ever thought possible.
I also found it interesting to contrast the kinds of questions I asked (from a developer's point of view) with the questions asked by the project managers. My questions were more about how to make Scrum work with our tools such as JIRA (with Green Hopper plugin) and Confluence, and how to build a truly cross-functional team that has all the skills necessary to implement any product backlog item from start to finish. I was really surprised to find out that many of the companies my colleagues work for do not use issue tracking systems, or know what Subversion does!
My next plan is to create wiki pages that talk about how to implement Scrum in our company using as few words possible. I think it's important to make it short and readable. I've written several process documents for our company before, usually over 50 pages, and I find that people don't read the whole thing or remember what they read.
Working from his home office in Toronto,
Ryan de Laplante can be found developing software in
Java by day, and obsessing with technology by night.
Ryan has been designing and writing software for
IJW since 1998 and is very passionate about his work.
