Met Jeff Sutherland

I got the chance to sit down with Dr. Jeff Sutherland last week. What an honor! It was at an event put on by Digital LA.

At the event, Jeff went over the basics of Scrum and some general insights.

Among his many pearls of wisdom - I enjoyed that he reminded us of the MIT slogan "Demo or Die". It's so important to show progress. Although apparently MIT changed that mantra to imagine and realise in the 90s.

It was perfect timing, as I gave my first lecture on Scrum that very weekend.

My lecture btw, went off without a hitch. I entitled it Scrum 101. Here's a look at the syllabus:

- A brief history of Scrum and its significance

- A functional understanding of the framework

- Basic instruction on implementing Scrum in your next small team project

I was able to cover my material in an hour and 15 minutes. However, I think I'll plan on a two hour timebox in the future. After the material was covered, we had a Q&A session that lasted for an additional hour.

Hyperproductive Distributed Scrum Teams W/ Jeff Sutherland

Distributed teams can be a nightmare with Scrum, if you don't know how to tackle the challenges that they present.



Here's a link to a PDF that shares some of the slides in the presentation:

PDF

One interesting tidbit, Jeff asked...

Are you properly doing Scrum? He then referenced the Nokia Test as the benchmark.

Here's the Nokia Test by Bas Vodde

• Are you doing iterative development?
– Sprints must be time boxed to four weeks or less
– Software features must be tested and working at
the end of an iteration
– Sprints must start with an Agile specification
• Only 50% of Scrum teams worldwide meet these
criteria
• Do you know who the product owner is?
• Is there a product backlog prioritized by business value that has
estimates created by the team?
• Does the team generate burndown charts and know their
velocity?
• Is the team’s work free from disruption by project managers (or
anyone else)?

Jeff Sutherland on Scrum

Jeff is one of the founders of scrum. Watch this to get the story for the horses mouth.




Here one of the cool slides that he goes over.



It explains really well how companies function. I know that I've worked for more than one autocratic organization!