The Elements of Scrum

like having their tasks, agreements, and progress charts in plain sight at all times.

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.

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!”

‘rugby’ approach—where a team tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth.”

You may well have a brilliant architect on your agile team, but on a scrum team, she is not “The Architect.” The team will value her expertise as an important resource and often look to her for guidance. The architecture will have her fingerprints all over it, but she won’t be “in charge of the architecture.” The team shares that responsibility equ

Software development, however, bears little resemblance to double-blind drug testing. It is a process fraught with unknowns, a journey of discovery.

“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.”

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

Being agile is about building a flexible process that anticipates and embraces change, allowing the team to adapt to new requirements and unexpected developments. It is a by-now-familiar refrain: inspect and adapt. Notice how that mantra surfaces in every discussion of every agile value?