Alt.Net Mailing List - The Hidden Benefits

Since the Alt.Net mailing list saw it's first post on October 8, 2007, the list has seen an average of 87 posts per day. The content is wonderful (now that we aren't arguing about the name so much).
This high volume has also done wonders for my ability to scan and speed read. This is a skill that I had during my schooling but seemed to have lost. Now that I have been following this mailing list, I have seen much more zero-bounce in my blog reader - even though I have more feeds coming in.

Now, I can finally keep up with the volume of content coming from Ayende's blog.

Am I Doing Scrum? - Nokia's Benchmark for Scrum Adoption

Dr. Jeff Sutherland, and Agile Manifesto signatory, has posted an excellent interview, "Scrum and Not-Scrum". As part of this interview, he advocates eight questions that Nokia uses to determine if their teams have adopted Scrum. Jeff presents this as a boolean test. If the team can answer "yes" to all eight of these questions, they are doing Scrum. If any question gets a "no," then they have not fully adopted Scrum. Here are the questions:

First Tier:

• Are you doing iterative development?
  
• Do you have a fixed iterations lasting less than six weeks?
• At the end of the iteration, do you have working software?
• Can the team effectively start work on an iteration without a detailed specification?
• Is testing part of the increment?

Second Tier:

• Do you have a product owner?
• Does the product owner have a prioritized, estimated product backlog?
• When the team is developing, do they have a burndown chart?
  
• Can you calculate the team's velocity?
• Is the team self-organizing?
  
• In other words, does the team choose, assign, and map the fastest possible way to deliver the work?
  
• The project manager cannot interfere with the team during an iteration.

I highly recommend watching this interview. It is only about 20 minutes long, and it is packed with good information including a summary of Google's boiled frog adoption of Scrum on the AdWords project.

Jeff also reminds us that Scrum will not solve your organizational problems, but it will make them painfully obvious.