This is my presentation “I Ran Out of Silver Bullters, Now What?” at Shanghai Scrum Gathering 2010.
In this presentation, I talked about symptoms applying Scrum. No doubts, beginners or junior practioners will definitely meet those in their Scrum implementation. It’s very easy to conclude Scrum as root cause, since this is the only thing changed before and after Scrum adoptation. But people didn’t realize the real root cause, even wrongly applied Scrum, it will not change your actual way of developing software. In their so-called Scrum, people just attend more meetings, acknowledge more impediments more frequently, and they were already there, it’s just something made them pop up.
Through that 1 hour presentation, I went through those common symptoms, they’re like code smells. You could smell them from those meetings : Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective. And in general, one really big problem is “Laptop Meetings”, also the very effective signal that something is wrong. In those meetings, people don’t listen to others, therefore it re-enfores the need of a coordinator, which directly ask others to report and command back. People don’t feel there is a need to share, anything. Whenever there is need for communication, they’ll go for tools, email, sometimes they may call each other trying to solve the problem, or they may throw it to their manager to complain.
Well, I like people giving me feedback, no matter if they’re comments, doubts, questions, or even criticism. So, if you participated in my presentation, and feel anything to say, just tell me, reply on my blog, or send me a message, or you could find me at some places below :
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/kaveri
- http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ScrumChina
- https://groups.google.com/group/agilechina
Besides my own presentation, there are also others, you could find all those presentations at Scrum Alliance. Or check the Twitter tag “#sgcn”, following “@ScrumAlliance”, or us the presenters, etc. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures this time, I think InfoQ or ScrumCn or other sponsors will publish theirs, let’s see.
The topic like “QA Role In Scrum” was popular, it appeared both in the Open Space discussion and the Scrum Clinic session. In the Open Space, Tencent’s QQ Music team invited other Internet business people to join their discussion, and I join for interest. Well, the outcome was, the problems are so similar despite we’re in the different business areas. Internet busincess just have more on-live support requests than us in Telecom, and of course more often. Well, the high frequency of customer bug fix is enough to make a difference, while considering the product teams are much smaller than a Telecom product, they can not dedicate a team for maintenance and rotate.
Oh, Bas’ key note was attractive, “’Scrum doesn’t work in China!?”, definitely the participants paid attention to. Bas was so nice and kind of careful of his word, that’s so different from the Bas I know. The Bas I know was more like the Dutch people in his presentation, always have an opinion and will tell you the opinion, will notice but doesn’t mind if the opinion is polite enough or not. However, the final conclusion in this key note was, Scrum can work in China, since there is a comparably Agile-promoting culture.
There are 4 people from our company presenting :
- MB III – Lv Yi – System Thinking in large-scale Scrum
- Tulip – Xu Yi – I Run Out of Silver Bullet – Now What?
- MB III – Sky Jin –Building shared leadership in Scrum teams
- Lotus/Orchid- Dou Hanzhi – Release Your Daily SW Builds
BTW, another company from Hangzhou was also a big contributor, Perficient, they have 2 presentations, including Vernon Stinebaker, who is really passionated in Agile. He has also wrote a blog about this gathering at their company blog, titled “Shanghai Scrum Gathering 2010”.
