Software projects that are developed based on agile processes like Scrum or eXtreme Programming are very demanding concerning the skills of the developers in an agile team.

In 2001 Andrew Hunt and David Thomas introduced a benchmark for modern developers with their book  „The Pragmatic Programmer“. The focus of their work is on practises, tools and design-paradigms to help programmers produce better code. read more…

scrumdays are local smaller sized events where SCRUM communities can meet and exchange their experience. As we are also very active in the agile community, codecentric of course had also a booth at todays scrumday in Düsseldorf. From the talks I was able to pick up two trending topics, which are quite interesting. They are not dealing with what scrum is and why it is great.
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Many “conventional” project manager are quite offish about Scrum or they even reject it completely. One of the reasons for this behaviour is that they cannot identify with Scrum since there isn’t a role “project manager” in Scrum. Throughout our Meet the Experts – Agility I had the opportunity to talk a bit about this topic with Boris Gloger.

Before, within an open space session Boris had presented his point of view on the role Product Owner. Throughout this presentation I realised that this role has a lot more elements of the conventional project manager role than I thought before. I got the perception that the responsibilities of the conventional project manager became distributed across the roles Product Owner and Scrum Master in a certain way. Having this picture in mind I asked Boris about it and he confirmed my perception. To be exact, he even extended it a bit:
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Not available in English.

Jeff Sutherland himself infected me with Scrum a year ago. We were using eXtreme Programming practices since years, and in my opinion Scrum was the ideal supplement to form an agile project management framework.

Since then we use Scrum in most of our projects in combination with eXtreme Programming and gradually certify all employees as Certified ScrumMaster. For me, Jeff has not promised too much: our customers enjoy a dramatic increase in productivity and quality. Especially the short release cycles (sprints), most often 2 weeks long, caused some excitement.

Even so, we have not always been able to fully implement Scrum together with our customers. During Jeff’s training, but also in Scrum Books by Ken Schwaber, it is always assumed, that Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team are from the same organisation. How does that fit into the working model of a service company as we are, and which roles are fulfilled by the customers and which roles are played by us? So far Scrum was not giving an answer to that.

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