Quotes & Sayings About Scrum

Any Scrum without working product at the end of a sprint is a failed Scrum. — Jeff Sutherland

With agile retrospectives the team drives their own actions! — Ben Linders

The scrum and the tackle are the two really contentious areas of the game. If you get those two aspects right, most rugby matches will work in your favour. — Alan Lewis

I am not great in a crowd. I don't see a lot of rock shows because sometimes I am afraid I won't get out. I used to squeeze my little self into the scrum and jump around and cause tiny trouble. Now I just want to sit down and have someone perform my five favorite songs while I eat a light dinner and receive a simultaneous pedicure. Is there some kind of awesome indie/alt/hip-hop/electronica music tour that can do that? — Amy Poehler

Without a good facilitator, a retrospective most likely will be a disaster. — Luis Goncalves

A jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce - like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa. — Prince Charles

Differences:

Scrum:
- Timeboxed iterations prescribed.

Kanban:
- Timeboxed iterations optional. Can have separate cadences for planning, release, and process improvement. Can be event - driven instead of timeboxed. — Henrik Kniberg

As a journalist, I can also now understand his (Patrick O'Brian's)idea that the Q&A is not particularly civilized - let alone a sports media press scrum. The formats don't necessarily further understanding between two people. It is not always true conversation - a discussion that unearths nuggets of insight. It too often seems like interviewers are running through a pre-fab checklist, looking for a Tweetable quote, trolling for a gaffe, or ticking off pre-conceived points like those on a medical checklist at the doctor's office. It can feel invasive, like a trip to the proctologist - in front of an audience. — Knute Berger

Interestingly, Agile's scrum-team approach has its own way of aggregating some execution risk. For example, in a traditional "single task owner" approach, the risk of execution is not aggregated at all, leaving that task owner to add a lot of task-level buffer to self-insure and deliver on his commitment. In contrast, a 5-person scrum team aggregates the risk that any single individual will make slow progress, as the other four team members can often make up the deficit.

But why aggregate only up to the scrum-team level? Taking a lesson from the insurance industry, the more that risk can be aggregated, the easier it is to manage. Applied to projects, this will nearly always mean that it's better to aggregate risk at the project level. As a result, an Agile project can improve speed by avoiding sprint-level commitments. — Michael Hannan

One of the Scrum rules is that work cannot be pushed onto a team; the Product Owner offers items for the iteration, and the team pulls as many as they decide they can do at a sustainable pace with good quality. — Craig Larman

Summary of Scrum vs Kanban

Similarities:
- Both are Lean and Agile
- Both use pull scheduling
- Both limit WIP
- Both use transperency to drive process improvement
- Both focus on delivering releasable software and often
- Both are based on self-organizing teams
- Both require breaking the work into pieces.
- In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity/lead time) — Henrik Kniberg

Scrum is like your mother-in-law, it points out ALL your faults. — Ken Schwaber

Would you fancy a shag?"
"Is that like a scrum?"
"It could be. — Caleb Crain

Three bloody roles, Scrum has, and only three. If you can't get that right, don't call it Scrum, OK? — Ron Jeffries

The Scrum idea of a separated Scrum Master is good for Scrum, but not appropriate for most projects. Good development requires not just talkers but doers. — Bertrand Meyer

I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it. — Ken Schwaber

To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible. — Bertrand Meyer

Agile Manifesto." It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology. — Jeff Sutherland

If you find that your organization can't make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization. — Jim Highsmith

Before starting a retrospective, you need to think about which exercises would be most suitable. — Ben Linders

I totally accept that it's a legitimate criticism that when you are involved in the day-to-day scrum of government ... that what can get lost is the narrative, the hymn sheet ... the song that inspires and lifts people's sights. — Nick Clegg

I do my own analysis on the teams I am refereeing. I will know some of the personalities, the players who could be difficult customers in a scrum situation, the ones I am going to have to really work hard on early in the game to get what I want. — Alan Lewis

A ScrumMaster who takes teams beyond getting agile practices up and running into their deliberate and joyful pursuit of high performance is an agile coach. — Lyssa Adkins

Scrum embraces the fact that in product development, some level of variability is required in order to build something new. — Kenneth S. Rubin

We need to uncover better ways to improve and retrospectives can provide the solution. — Ben Linders

Getting feasible actions out of a retrospective and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. — Ben Linders

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? — Chad Harbach

The goal of retrospectives is help teams to continuously improve their way of working. — Ben Linders

Someone broke from the scrum and, punching and kicking, staggered towards the Klatchian goal.
"Isn't that man your butler?" said Ahmed.
"Yes."
"One of your soldiers said he bit a man's nose off."
Vimes shrugged. "He's got a very pointed look if I don't use the sugar tongs, I know that. — Terry Pratchett

I was too far away to observe what color Enid Starkie's eyes were; all I remember of her is that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious French accent. — Julian Barnes

Agile retrospectives give the power to the team, where it belongs! — Ben Linders

The Scrum Master, the person in charge of running the process, asks each team member three questions: 1. What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint? 2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint? 3. What obstacles are getting in the team's way? That's it. That's the whole meeting. — Jeff Sutherland

Doing scrum" is as meaningless (and impossible) as creating an instance of an abstract class. Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction. It is not a process and it is not prescriptive. — Tobias Mayer

Rituals bring people together, allowing them to focus on what is important and to acknowledge significant events or accomplishments. — Luis Goncalves

No, hoplite fighting was more individual and more spread out - a matter of spear fighting, not a gigantic, demented rugby scrum. — J.E. Lendon

Changing practices is one thing; changing minds is quite another — Mike Cohn

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management - testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes. — Tilo Linz