Small blog post. Last week went to the Agile event organised by Arrows Group and Jeff Sutherland was very inspiring and convincing talking about Scrum.

Have taken this picture during the event.

Jeff Sutherland explains Scrum – wed 12th June 2013, Amsterdam, Agile Event by Arrows Group, The Netherlands – Inspiring, Convincing.

A lot of what he spoke about were recognizable, like:

• Allocating a 5-story point item for any unknown incoming issues – like having a hotline we have for urgent issues.
• Do not have support teams that only do bugfixing. Jeff used the exact words ‘teams are to eat their own dogfood!’
• Giving teams the power to do the best they can, always hold retrospectives, keep an eye on Happiness etc

Jeff also had a clear view on ‘business people’ wanting to interfere in a sprint with unplanned things.
He mentioned that if that effort overflows the ‘5-story point for urgent issues’ the team has to reply with “We can only do this if we break off the sprint, do you want us to do that?”
The idea here is that there must be a good reason why a sprint is broken so not many stakeholders would do such a thing. There should be only one person per team who can make that decision. More on that here.