One of the few Scrum mandates is to have potentially shippable code at the end of each iterations. I have encountered some very interesting things while trying to adhere to this principle.

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It was an incredible journey to attend SD Best Practices 2006! I found that I have learned more from talking to other attendees and the speakers (most notably Mike Cohn and Johanna Rothman), than from the class materials themselves (even though I have learned a lot from there as well). I salute everyone who had given me insight on how to do better. By virtue of One Minute Manager, I will be sharing some musings as to what I have learned this week.

Questions questions and questions. We had a Q&A session with Ken mostly about implementation of Scrum in various types of projects and environments. The gist of it is there’s really no right answer. That is why Scrum is not a methodology, but rather, a framework that can help you identify the issues, and forces you to resolve them. In every day work, we are faced with numerous impediments and problems that can slow down our work, but often times we ignore them and just accept the inefficiency. Scrum practices exposes them to the maximum level and mandate them be resolved.

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True wisdom lies in knowing what you don’t know, and I have certainly been served my share of humble pie just with the first of my two-days ScrumMaster Certification training. I was reminded of many things that I have forgotten or let slided.

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Just a quick update on ScrumWorks. We have been using ScrumWorks at work and so far it has been working out very nicely. I have to say I really appreciate the simplicity of its interface. I would classify no bells and whistles as a feature The only complaint I really have is the export to Excel feature can use some work. But overall, it’s a great package at an unbeatable cost. One of my engineers (Steve McGarry, among the best that I have worked with) actually said he hates MS Project but this is much more managable.

UPDATE: I have since switched to WordPress due to spam issues. See my Battle of the Blogs: Part 2 entry.

This site is powered by b2evolution if you haven’t noticed. Why did I pick it? First of all, I searched on SourceForge.net on “php blog”, sorted by number of downloads and b2evolution came up at the top, with over 150k downloads. Now even though I have heard about WordPress before, it didn’t come up in the search. Even though they claim that they have moved off SourceForge.net, still a big mistake on their part to have neither “php” nor “blog” in their listing.

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I haven’t been involved in marketing a website for a very long time. Although my team does develop websites in my current line of work, they are either non-search-engine important, or the marketing aspect is, well handled by the Marketing department.

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Thanks to one of the software directors, we have been introduced to Scrum via the Managerial Bookclub. After some consideration, I have decided to implement it on two of our projects. The team is all up for it. That’s one of the many things that I love about my team. They are not afriad of changes and are always looking for ways to do things better.

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