Highlights

  • simple. I looked at how people actually work, rather than how they say they work. I (Location 210)
  • Why do some teams achieve greatness and others mediocrity? (Location 213)
  • Traditionally, management wants two things on any project: control and predictability. (Location 216)
  • Every project involves discovery of problems and bursts of inspiration. Trying to restrict a human endeavor of any scope to color-coded charts and graphs is foolish and doomed to failure. (Location 220)
  • At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? And question whether there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and what might be keeping you from doing that. (Location 231)
  • In software development there is a rule, borne out by decades of research, that 80 percent of the value in any piece of software is in 20 percent of the features. (Location 268)
  • Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20 percent first. Often by the time they’re done, they realize they don’t really need the other 80 percent, or that what seemed important at the outset actually isn’t. (Location 272)
  • “Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology. (Location 285)
  • Scrum works by setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time. (Location 308)
  • In Scrum we call these cycles “Sprints.” At the beginning of each cycle there is a meeting to plan the Sprint. The team decides how much work they think they can accomplish during the next two weeks. They’ll take the work items off that prioritized list of things that need to be done and often just write them out on sticky notes and put them on the wall. The team decides how many of those work items they can get done during this Sprint. (Location 314)
  • they weren’t aligned—weren’t united in a common purpose. What Scrum does is bring teams together to create great things, and that requires everyone not only to see the end goal, but to deliver incrementally toward that goal. (Location 411)
  • In this book you’re going to learn some of the fundamental ways that people work best, why we’re awful at estimating, and why working overtime will make your project late. (Location 426)
  • I credit this to the training I got from the Air Force on how to control risk. That training taught me to do four things: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. (Location 461)
  • Inspect and Adapt (Location 623)
  • It’s hard to believe, but we regularly see somewhere between a 300- to 400-percent improvement in productivity among groups that implement Scrum well. (Location 625)
  • perhaps what Deming is most famous for, is the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act). You can apply this cycle to the production of just about anything, be it a car, a videogame, or, heck, even a paper airplane. (Location 647)
  • In Deming’s world “to act” means to change your way of working based on real results and real environmental input. It’s the same strategy used by Brooks’s robot. (Location 659)
  • Japan Scrum isn’t seen as the latest work fad. They regard it as a way of doing, a way of being, a way of life. When (Location 687)
  • CHAPTER THREE Teams (Location 726)
  • The actual answer, though, is that there is a much larger difference in team performance than there is in individual performance. (Location 754)
  • It actually didn’t take the slow team ten weeks to do what the best team could do in one week. Rather, it took them two thousand weeks. (Location 755)
  • Transcendent: They have a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary. (Location 778)
  • Autonomous: The teams are self-organizing and self-managing, they have the power to make their own decisions about how they do their jobs, and are empowered to make those decisions stick. (Location 781)
  • One of the key concepts in Scrum is that the team members decide themselves how they’re going to do the work. It’s management’s responsibility to set the strategic goals, but it’s the team’s job to decide how to reach those goals. (Location 868)
  • What did you do since the last time we talked? What are you going to do before we talk again? And (Location 875)
  • what is getting in your way? (Location 876)
  • Each team has all the people on it do everything, soup to nuts. (Location 921)
  • “What team are you on?” If he or she responds by mentioning the product they’re working on (say automation or integration) rather than their specialty (such as network engineering), she nods approvingly. (Location 932)
  • if you have more than nine people on a team, their velocity actually slows down. That’s right. More resources make the team go slower. (Location 1014)
  • everyone on a Scrum team has to know what everyone else is doing. All the work being done, the challenges faced, the progress made, has to be transparent to everyone else. And (Location 1052)
  • “Scrum Master.” He or she would facilitate all the meetings, make sure there was transparency, and, most important, help the team discover what was getting in their way. The (Location 1074)
  • Ideally, at the end of each iteration, each Sprint, the team would look closely at itself—at its interactions, practices, and processes—and ask two questions: “What can we change about how we work?” and “What is our biggest sticking point?” (Location 1078)
  • Anyway, this group of researchers gathered together a bunch of male college students and asked them a couple of simple questions: “Why did you choose your major?” and “Why are you dating the person you are?” And then the researchers asked their subjects to answer the same questions about their best friend. Important differences emerged. When the students talked about themselves, they talked not about themselves personally but, rather, what they were asked about. They said such things as, “Chemistry is a high-paying field” about their major, and “She’s a very warm person” about their girlfriend. But when they talked about their friends, they talked about their friends’ abilities and needs—things such as, “He was always good at math,” or “He’s kind of dependent and needs a take-charge kind of woman.”10 (Location 1095)
  • We all perceive ourselves as responding to a situation, while we see others as motivated by their character. (Location 1103)
  • It’s the system that surrounds us, rather than any intrinsic quality, that accounts for the vast majority of our behavior. (Location 1111)
  • CHAPTER FOUR Time (Location 1213)
  • Time is the ultimate limiter of human endeavor, affecting everything from how much we work, to how long things take, to how successful we are. (Location 1215)
  • We’re lousy focusers, we spend far more hours in the office than needed, and we’re horrible estimators of how long things will take. (Location 1227)
  • When I sat down to develop Scrum, I had no intention of creating a new “process.” I simply wanted to gather together all the research that had been done for decades on how people work best and emulate that. (Location 1229)
  • told the CEO I wasn’t going to show him a long and detailed Gantt chart that we both knew was wrong, he said, “Fine. What are you going to show me?” And I told him that each month I’d show him a piece of working software. Not something that works in the back end. Not some piece of architecture. A piece of software that a customer can actually use. A fully implemented feature. (Location 1250)
  • And so my team embarked on what we called “Sprints.” We called them that because the name evoked a quality of intensity. We were going to work all out for a short period of time and then stop to see where we were. (Location 1254)
  • They, like many of the best teams now, work in one-week Sprints. Every Thursday they sit down and look at the massive backlog of things they have to do, everything from prototyping a new dashboard design to testing turn signals. They’ve prioritized that list, and then they say, “Okay, given that list, how many things can we do this week?” And by “do” they mean “done”—done completely. These new features work. The car drives. Each week. Each Sprint. (Location 1260)
  • nothing gets moved to Done unless it can be used by the customer. (Location 1280)
  • They’re of a set duration. You don’t do a one-week Sprint and then a three-week Sprint. You have to be consistent. You want to establish a work rhythm where people know how much they can get done in a set period of time. Often that quantity surprises them. (Location 1283)
  • once the team commits to what they’re going to accomplish, the tasks are locked in. (Location 1285)
  • interfering and distracting the team slows its speed dramatically. (Location 1287)
  • What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint? 2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint? 3. What obstacles are getting in the team’s way? (Location 1310)
  • The problem that I frequently see crop up is that people have a tendency to treat the Daily Stand-up as simply individual reporting. “I did this … I’ll do that”—then on to the next person. The more optimum approach is closer to a football huddle. A wide receiver might say, “I’m having a problem with that defensive lineman,” to which an offensive blocker might respond, “I’ll take care of that. I’ll open that line.” (Location 1353)
  • The idea is for the team to quickly confer on how to move toward victory—i.e., complete the Sprint. Passivity is not only lazy, it actively hurts the rest of the team’s performance. (Location 1356)
  • Think about your job. How much of your time is wasted while you’re waiting for someone else to finish their work, or for information to be delivered, or because you’re trying to do too many things at once? Maybe you would rather be at work all day—me, I’d rather be surfing. (Location 1409)
  • Demo or Die. At the end of each Sprint, have something that’s done—something that can be used (to fly, drive, whatever). (Location 1417)
  • CHAPTER FIVE Waste Is a Crime (Location 1428)
  • What if I can take human patterns and make them positive rather than negative? What if I can design a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle that encourages the best parts of ourselves and diminishes the worst? In giving Scrum a daily and weekly rhythm, I guess what I was striving for was to offer people the chance to like the person they see in the mirror. (Location 1441)
  • usually find that about 85 percent of effort is wasted. Only a sixth of any of the work done actually produces something of value. (Location 1456)
  • Ohno talked about three different types of waste. He used the Japanese words: Muri, waste through unreasonableness; Mura, waste through inconsistency; and Muda, waste through outcomes. (Location 1462)
  • Plan, Do, Check, Act. Plan means avoid Muri. Do means avoid Mura. Check means avoid Muda. Act means the will, motivation, and determination to do all that. (Location 1467)
  • Do One Thing at a Time (Location 1473)
  • There’s a great chart that appears in one of the classic works on how to develop computer software, Quality Software Management by Gerald Weinberg:4 Number of Simultaneous Projects Percent of Time Available per Project Loss to Context (Location 1522)
  • If something is half done at the end of the Sprint, you’re worse off than if you hadn’t started at all. You’ve expended resources, effort, and time and gotten nothing to a deliverable state. You have a half-constructed car. (Location 1602)
  • Now, you might think, hey, they’ve built the cars; they’ve got that part done, right? They aren’t half-built cars—what’s the problem? The problem is that too much inventory is pretty much the same thing as work in process. If you’re tying up a huge amount of value in things that aren’t delivering value, you won’t have those resources to do other things—such as market more, or push more sales, or explore new ideas. (Location 1616)
  • Jobs that aren’t done and products that aren’t being used are two aspects of the same thing: invested effort with no positive outcome. Don’t do it. (Location 1621)
  • It took twenty-four times longer. If a bug was addressed on the day it was created, it would take an hour to fix; three weeks later, it would take twenty-four hours. (Location 1668)
  • Working Too Hard Makes More Work (Location 1681)
  • The peak of productivity actually falls at a little bit less than forty hours a week. (Location 1708)
  • Scrum asks those who engage in it to break from the mind-set of measuring merely hours. Hours themselves represent a cost. Instead, measure output. Who cares how many hours someone worked on something? All that matters is how fast it’s delivered and how good (Location 1763)
  • But we don’t live in a perfect world, and bad processes are so ingrained in our thinking that, as an alternative, we need the lightest-weight process with the greatest impact on work. What Scrum does is focus us on trying to eliminate the pointless waste that seems part and parcel of work. (Location 1792)
  • CHAPTER SIX Plan Reality, Not Fantasy (Location 1831)
  • the very act of planning is so seductive, so alluring, that planning itself becomes more important than the actual plan. And the plan becomes more important than reality. (Location 1880)
  • One of the key things we did with each sticky note was write down not only what had to be created, but also how we’d know when it was done. (Location 1924)
  • Plan in just enough detail to deliver the next increment of value, and estimate the remainder of the project in larger chunks. (Location 1955)
  • Size Does Matter, but Only Relatively (Location 1978)
    1. On a scale from 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in the company? 2. On the same scale, how do you feel about the company as a whole? 3. Why do you feel that way? 4. What one thing would make you happier in the next Sprint? (Location 2444)