Tim Bowler

Over the last few months I have been working with numerous teams over multiple projects/programmes and which are usually unrelated. From a scrum scaling perspective how do you go about maintaining visibility across projects and making sure that the teams are working efficiently? After all the talks about a scrum of scrums meeting, I felt that these don’t seem to work well at programme level. Therefore, I had to scale further…..

Scrum of Scrums

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XP Day

This was my second year at xpday and I can honestly say it excellent. This year’s programme really suited my personal agenda of lean software development, kanban and test driven development (TDD). Also the programme’s open space structure changed, but in a good way for me. The open space sessions occupied most of the second day this which I personally thought was good, as last year the open sessions where spread over both days. This ment that it was possible to get into more sessions as there where less of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Before starting, I would like to tell you the two reasons why I want to share this. Firstly, the many books on scrum that I have read all talk about scrum in large corporate companies where the team might work on a project at a time. As I work in a small creative digital agency where we have many projects on the go, not to mention other influencing work – how does scrum fit in with us? The second reason is how to introduce scrum into a place where the core management do not really understand the scrum process and do not wish to know.

Early last year I heard about a management process called Scrum. As we didn’t really have any management process in place for the development team, I felt it necessary that we needed something. I began reading about Scrum, and could see the benefits that scrum would bring us. Before long, I booked myself on a SCM course, which was a 6 month wait. In the mean time, I decided to implement some of the scrum practices based on my understanding at the time. The first thing I done was bought 3 sprint boards, which were placed at the end of the office where everyone can view them. The following week we started to have morning scrum meetings. This was at most the very basic attempt at scrum that we employed.

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My first experience of XP was excellent. Both days revolved around open space sessions and several other talks

Thursday’s talks

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After one and a half years of using scrum, I have finally been accepted as a Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP). But, this is only the beginning! I think the next step is to go for certified scrum trainer status. During the last year or two I have learned a great deal of scrum implementation which of course I will be sharing fairly soon.

Early this year I was looking for a better development process to introduce into the company that I work for, and I came across SCRUM. After reading a few books I realised that by using SCRUM our whole development process would be a lot more efficient. Therefore, in June I successfully introduced part of the SCRUM process. I say only part of SCRUM because we did not follow every guideline. In Novemeber I completed the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) course.

In the new year, we have a few more developers starting at work and therefore this will be a test bed to see how successfully I can implement the whole of SCRUM. In July 2008 I will update this post about how I went on to fully implement SCUM and distributed SCRUM.

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