Scrum has proven effective at promoting communication between members of a development team.  The question of how to scale this high-bandwidth communication across teams, especially in large organizations, remains an area of active exploration and debate.  Will Read has proposed a mesh-network inspired alternative to the popular Scrum-of-Scrums meeting for achieving this goal.

I found it interesting, and so I wrote about it for InfoQ. Read the article here.

Cheers,

Chris

Nonfunctional requirements describe qualities of a system (what it is) rather than its behaviors (what it does). Scott Ambler inspired much discussion when he recently asserted "Scrum’s product backlog concept works well for simple functional requirements, but… it comes up short for nonfunctional requirements and architectural constraints." in an article on Dr. Dobb’s Portal.

I reported on this for InfoQ, and you can read it here.

Cheers,

Chris

I just had the pleasure of leading a half-day Agile/Scrum workshop for Autodesk. The goal was to do some education and get some ideas generated as to how this company might adopt agile practices. The group was smart, curious, and very engaged.

Several years ago I read The Autodesk File, a book about how this company was founded, and how it grew to be a major software company. It was neat to walk around the offices, knowing how it all began.

Talk about a great way to spend the morning. 🙂

Cheers,

Chris

The traditional roles on a scrum team are: Product Owner, Developer, and Scrum Master. Noticeably absent is the role of Team Leader; the team is expected to self-organize. Similarly, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has dispensed entirely with the role of conductor in favor of a process where leadership is shared and decisions are made by the team. The result has been to create one of the world’s most renowned chamber orchestras. Along the way, they have learned lessons and ways of working together that any Scrum team can benefit from.

Read the full story here.

Cheers,

Chris