The Elements of Scrum

63 year-old daredevil named Annie Edson Taylor decided to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel for no obvious reason whatsoever. She survived with only a few bruises and gashes and declared, upon emerging, “I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces, than make another trip over the falls.”

There was a time when Brad would have tried to pressure the team into committing to more work, but he has learned that the team’s velocity—the number of points it gets done each sprint—doesn’t lie.

Agility is not about cutting corners to go faster. Anyone who has worked in a cluttered up, ill-maintained legacy code base will attest to the fact that progress comes slowly when those who went before us took shortcuts.

This vision encompasses who the product is being built for, why they need it, and how they will use it. It informs all of the many decisions that must be made in order to make the product a reality.

the secret to the success of this new method lay in his use of empirical processes (inspect and adapt), rather than defined processes (plan and execute),

Either way, it’s the product owner’s responsibility to make sure that requirements are available and understood by the team. This means the product owner must be available to the team, in order to field the many questions that will come up during the sprint.

Document as you go, and only as needed. When you bake the documentation into your process, you only write documentation that is relevant and useful. Build cross-functional teams to break down silos, so that no individual or department can become a process or information bottleneck.

Change control can only work in a context in which change is actually controllable.

“The agile movement is not anti-methodology,” Highsmith wrote, “in fact, many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modeling, but not in order to file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository.”

It is likely that some stakeholders will fall back on old habits, and go directly to team members in an attempt to get their stuff done quickly. Team members can learn to redirect these requests with artfully diplomatic ripostes like: “This sounds important, you should bring it to our product owner!”