Saving the Scrum – Serious This Time!

Almost exactly one year ago Markus and I met at Agile2014 and came up with a new idea, “Save Our Scrum.” We saw problems across not only our customers, but also most line employees we met at user groups, on twitter, and nearly every “Agile” event we attended. A few months later we announced it right here on our blog as the Save Our Scrum initiative. In January 2015, Matt gave a presentation with the same name at CodeMash, then again in March at the Federation of Agile Testers in the Netherlands outside of Amsterdam. Go ahead and click the link and scroll down for the reviews – they ain’t terrible.

Our friends at Diaz & Hilterscheid, who organized conferences, got excited enough about the idea to offer a workshop on the topic at Agile Testing Days 2015, November 10th in Potsdam, Germany, with both Markus and Matt. We pleased an honored.

But maybe you can’t get to Germany in November. Or, even if you can, you think two hours isn’t enough to both cover what matters in Scrum and get to real problem-solving.

If that is the case, this post is for you.

 Announcing Save Our Scrum – The Book

After Agile 2014, Markus and I went back to develop the material we would use for the talks. We wrote things down, creating an outline in five parts – our understanding of Scrum, why it works, what goes wrong, “nuggets” of insight, and case studies.

By the time Agile2015 rolled around, we had the first three parts done, and launched the book on leanpub for ten US dollars.

Purchase the book now and you’ll get the current version, the chance to influence the direction of the book, and, if you ask, an invitation to the slack room where we are discussing the material. That’s right — tell us your problems and we’ll write about it.

That’s not free consulting, but it is close. It also has a cost — mostly your time. All our experience is that these micro-costs improve the odds that people will listen to the advice. If you’re not sold, click on download on the Leanpub page for a bit of free material.

If you feel strongly enough, contribute to the book. The “nugget” format means writing one takes an hour or two.

Meanwhile, On Twitter …

The pro-scrum people say that if Scrum doesn’t need saving, it was just implemented wrong.

The anti-scrum people say we should be chasing value, not doing scrum better.

More than a few people who were the target audience for the book six months ago have given up on Scrum by the time we got the book out.

Look, folks. This book is about getting value out of software development, using a model like Scrum. We’ll talk about common traps that teams fall into and small experiments and ideas to get out (“tools, tips and techniques for teams in trouble”) If you aren’t “doing Scrum”, we expect you can get value from understanding it – many of the nuggets apply on nearly any project. Using the language of Scrum allows us to reduce friction in conversations, and set up some shared expectations.

Markus and Matt put our heads together, put off our families, billable work, and sometimes both to develop something we are proud of. We think it is advanced to the point that it is worth sharing. We would like your ideas to improve it. And yes, we’d like to ask for your support, one more time.

If you want free material, multiple times a week, check out our posts on Uncharted Waters, Matt’s articles for Stickyminds, or CIO.com,  or SearchSoftwareQuality, this blog or our archives. That’s just Matt – you could also look at Justin Rohrman’s work and Markus’s.

For now, we’d like your support, and we would also like to earn it. If Save Our Scrum is relevant for you, we hope you’ll consider it.

If not, tell us what is, or tell us about your own book.

We’ve love to hear about it.