Martin and I were planning to collect the results of the survey after 50 response were in, but we had a last minute rush this week (I assume due to people being back at work) so we now have a great 67 responses.

A big thankyou to all that have particpated and I hope you all find the answers very interesting. Martin will be do some analysis of the figures during his presentation to the Brisbane Scrum User Group on Jan 28th.

Teamwork, can it go too far? We all know the benefits of a performing team and the stages they go through: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing (Tuckman model) well maybe there should be a further step after this which I would like to call “Borg-ing”. “Borg-ing”, by my definition is to become Borg like. I don’t mean the teams all become cybernetically enhanced humanoid drones…

The global Scrum community is growing rapidly on a daily basis and nowhere is this more evident than in Australia. Australia now has 3 Scrum user groups, with hundreds of members all practicing (or moving) to Scrum.
Myself and Martin Kearns of Renewtek have put together an Australian focused Scrum survey to try and get a big picture of exactly where Scrum is down under. We hope to collect as many responses as possible from all over the country and provide the results back to you, the people on a regular basis. Providing we get enough people contributing to the surveys, it should provide us all with a “Scrum Dashboard” of what is happening out in the field and the issues that we most commonly face.

So do your bit for a good cause and TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Pass it on to as many people as possible within Australia!

This is a concept that I have created to help illustrate at a metaphoric level the benefits of Agile development over traditional methods.

The Agile Farmer constantly adapts to the changing requirements of the seed he has planted and adds small amounts of water, food and light on an on going basis for faster return on investment and greater business value.

The Agile Farmer (PDF)

Heres another freebie on some of the things to look out for when transitioning to Scrum and my top 10 hints and tips for working with Scrum in your organisation.

Scrum Practitioner Slides

After weeks of preperation and organisation I kicked off the first Brisbane Scrum User Group session last night. There was a huge turnout of people (42) from a wide spectrum of industries, government and private and a wide range of Scrum experiences.

Over 25 individual companies represented, ranging from small start up's (6 weeks old) through to large and government enterprise sized establishments.

There are currently over 80 people signed up online for the group, a massive interest in Scrum.

As you will see from the meeting details we had a packed agenda for the night, ran in a very agile manner, with a town hall update leading into good conversations over food, followed by a presentation from Rowan and then I facilitated a product backlog creation session.

Feel free to have alook at the meeting details, agenda and photos from the night here

A key component of the Scrum framework is the daily stand up meeting, the Scrum. The Scrum meeting is held at the same time and in the same place everyday and more than likely near to where the team works and where their task board is located. Each of the team members answer three questions in the scrum:

• What have you been working on since we last met?
• What are you going to work on?
• Do you have any impediments?

The scrum allows the team to understand what each member is doing and is essential to the team work involved in delivering a sprint. I also have one team that have added a fourth question to the list and that is “What is your confidence rating (1-10) of delivering the sprint goal?” This helps the team and Scrummaster identify some possibly hidden issues across the team.

As such it is usual for the team to decide on a late penalty for any team member who either does not attend the Scrum or turns up late. It’s essential that the team decides on this penalty and what, If any “excuses” are acceptable for being late. One of my teams went through this process recently and as the team came to the agreement that any later comers would provide donuts the following day as “punishment” one of the team members spoke out and said “I’m not doing that! What if I get stuck with a production support issue? That’s not my fault I am late”. The team then debated what was and wasn’t acceptable as a late excuse. After which they all agreed that the late penalty was to be donuts (again). A 100% agreement was reached across the team.

Ive been working hard recently on creating Australias first Scrum user group. I managed to gain 2 sponsors to provide the catering and a room, and we have a meetup site over at http://www.meetup.com/11/ and currently have 54 members signed up.

A few weeks ago, I submmited our group for appoval and listing with the Scrum Alliance. The great news is they have approved the group.

This makes us the first "official scrum user group" in Australia :)

You can find us listed on the Scrum Alliance website here http://www.scrumalliance.org/pages/user_groups