10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP
Sun, 2008-02-24 01:19 — Henrik Kniberg
Scrum & XP may sound deceptively simple. But once you get down to the everyday practical stuff there are many subtle traps hiding about. Common mistakes that are easy to make and hard to detect, mistakes that cancel out many of the benefits that Agile methods were supposed to give. In this talk I’ll go through some of these traps, how to detect them, what the effect is, and what can be done about them.
Process/Mechanics
This is a high-paced talk. Depending on group size I might hand out red & yellow & green ballots and ask people to rate their current project with respect to each pitfall (by waving ballots). Near the end I’ll ask participants to share their own favorite ways to fail.
Target audience
- People who are about to go agile and want to avoid the most common pitfalls
- Agile coaches who want to learn & share their experiences.
- People who have started going agile but are still struggling a bit with it. Will probably recognize many of these pitfalls and learn some tips & tricks.
Sample content
I’ll be talking about things such as:
- Velocity and how to misuse it
- Mergophobia (the fear of merging code)
- Technical debt
- Taskboard misuse
- Teams that aren’t teams (“well at least I finished my stuff”)