Ken Schwaber on Scrum

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011


Scrum features:

• Work is Timeboxed -- to create a healthy sense of urgency
• Cross-Functional Teams -- the people who are doing the work
  
• Small Team as Possible --
  
• Done and potentially shipped --
  

Ken identifies a core conflict in software development today:

1. Business development believes that they simply need to lean on product development to get the product finished on time.
2. Product development concedes and responds by reducing quality.

This is a problem because it creates technical debt...to the point (Ken estimates ~5 years) you end-up with a design-dead product. A product so hard to work on it stiffles the company's actual ability to adjust. It typically manifests in the existence of "core functionality"...

Core Functionality:

1. It is fragile -- if you change one thing it breaks a lot of stuff
2. There are not a lot of test harnesses around this core code.
   
3. Only a few "suckers" have an idea of how it works. The rest have moved on.
   

Any work to analyze low priority work is equivalent to "Inventory".


Ken referenced:

• The New New Product Development Game" Harvard Business Review in 1986
• Jeff Sutherland
  

SmartSVN

http://www.syntevo.com/smartsvn/whatsnew.html

• It's a SVN client.
• I like the visualization tool part. I'm not sure how often I'd use it, but I think in those cases where there's some branching going on, that would be cool to be able to pull it all up visually. If it easily shows what's in the change set that'd be hot. Of course, only available in the Professional edition (~$100).