Agile Otter Blog

This is not a manifesto. It looks a lot like a rather famous manifesto (the middle of it anyway) but it is not a manifesto. This is just a set of principles that I've successfully applied in numerous personal and professional settings, always with good effect. Pull  is a better flow than Push Continuous is more competent than Batch Agreements are more negotiable than Orders Brains per Task  is more efficient than Tasks per Person Improvement is a better goal than Compliance Fail Now is cheaper than Fail Later Simplicity works better than Discipline Safety is best May they serve you as well as they have served me so far. Peace.

I'm not a big scrum promoter, but I am VERY familiar with scrum and have coached many teams and always been able to improve their success with the method to some extent. I've taught scrum. I don't have to love scrum (not more than XP for certain!) to see that it's getting a bad rap. Ignoring advice to "never blog angry" I'm going to let the grumpy old man out for a minute, in hopes you'll hear what he has to say.  Suggestion:  Before railing on how scrum doesn't work  you should be sure that what you're doing is scrum. Some people say they're doing scrum because they have planning meetings, morning status meetings, and sometimes have reviews or retrospectives. But they're not sure why they're doing them, and these meetings just take time away from what would otherwise be potentially productive programming and testing time. So, let's get back to the basics here. Scrum is entirely based on transparency , inspection , a...