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