On my Danube blog, I really try to stick to Scrum-specific topics that will help our clients, the software community, and other interested folks navigate the challenging process of Scrum transformations.

In an email intercepted by the Associated Press last week, GM North America President Troy Clarke said "In these unprecedented times, GM is reinventing every aspect of our business, including our organizational size and structure, to create a lean and agile company." I immediately started wondering what Clarke meant by "lean and agile." Ultimately, everybody wants a lean and agile company (and p

Everyone who was at Agile 2008 last year in Toronto probably remembers a dinner speech which poked equal fun at XP and Scrum enthusiasts with a punchline I don't remember about XP and one I do remember about Scrum. The punchline was "certification!" Yes, it's true - we Scrum professionals love our CSM, CSP, CSC, CSPO, and CSTs.

Estimation is one of the topics I receive the most questions on from Scrum professionals of all experience levels. It's such a popular topic that all of our trainers have written blog posts on our website about estimation topics including discussions of actuals vs.

On Thursday, September 11th, I had the pleasure of speaking to an audience of around 75 PMPs at the Silicon Valley Chapter of PMI (http://www.pmisv.org/). Anup Deshpande was kind enough to invite me. As it turned out, I was greeted by a great audience with so many questions that we didn't get to the Ball Point Game I had planned. That might not seem like a big deal.

Scrum is inspiring to me because it is one of the few management paradigms that seems to capitalize on the best of human psychology, yielding a result that is both best for workers and for business. Scrum can make work fun and, when you spend eight or more hours per day at work, it ought to be both challenging and fun (more on this in another blog).

If you asked a few people in the Scrum community to define Scrum, you might be surprised to receive a different answer from every person. To me, it’s a management paradigm, a set of guiding principles, a key to employee retention, the embodiment of good application of organizational psychology, and just plain common sense. But if you polled the same group about the basic mechanics of Scrum, you'd notice much less discrepancy among their responses.

Scrum’s mechanics have three major parts: roles, meetings, and artifacts.

A friend of mine, who was pursuing his doctoral degree in electrical engineering, once tried to explain his dissertation to me by showing a program he wrote, walking me through the code line by line. I'm not an engineer, so I had no idea what he was talking about. But because he was immersed in the terminology of his field, he found it was hard to explain his work to an outsider.