Scrum from the trenches

Henrik Kniberg has written a 90-page paper on his experiences using software development methods Scrum and XP in The Real World: "Scrum And XP from the trenches". The result is a very pragmatic, easy to read description about Scrum, without any religion, buzzword overuse or extreme dogmas. Just like I consider "RUP made easy" a must-read for people who (want to) do RUP, this paper will be the one I'll recommend to people who want to know what this Scrum thing really is about. Well written, and a nice spread of topics and alternatives, with an explanation why stuff works the way it does.

I really like the task board, with all the notes on them (picture on the title page). On a previous project we did try something like this, but with too many stages (I think it was 15 instead of the three recommended by Henrik). Also the team thought it was patronizing because the team leader put up the notes and the team had very little influence. On top of that, the board was hard to reach (you had to climb on a desk :)). Almost everyone thought it was stupid at the time, but in retrospect, I think the idea was not that bad. We just didn't need a huge 15-stage noteboard with over a 100 notes, but an overview of team progress was really necessary. Would we have done a 3 stage taskboard with explicit team involvement I am confident it would have worked much better. With these kind of ideas, details like this may make something work great, or make people hate it.