 Good afternoon everybody Thanks for attending my class and my class my talk. My name is Dave West I'll come back to the mark twain quote. It's a quote that Ken Schwaber My my boss really likes to use on every one of his training classes because Sometimes on a training class with with Ken it definitely feels like you're eating a live frog. So who am I? so I'm the product owner at scrum.org Now we'll talk a little bit about who scrum.org is in a moment But the chairman of the board at scrum.org is Ken Schwaber So I report to can but I haven't always been the product owner at scrum.org I was the chief product officer at a startup called task top. We grew to about a hundred people I had seven scrum teams delivering working software. I was an analyst and research director at Forrester research before that and I have to admit it I developed something called the rational unified process now no booing, please. The rub is obviously a Part of our history. We made lots of mistakes, but we also learned lots of things. It was part of our evolution to maturity I hope and I have certainly lots of experience that I can share if anybody's gone any any comments on the rational unified process As you can see though really what I am is a dad now That's me and my son George at the top doing a very important sprint review as you can see from the background There's a there's a garage that we're very we were just built and we're currently I'm reviewing it with a key stakeholder George who's probably the most honest stakeholder over worked with now Harry the one below is ten weeks old now the great thing about having a ten week old at home is when you Have jet lag it feels nothing in comparison to having a ten week old at home You're like really I can go to sleep. There's no crying. There's no grumpy wife It's brilliant. Well, there is a grumpy wife But luckily the internet's not fabulous in the hotel. So she doesn't get to talk to me that often and some contact details there Now as you can tell from my accent, I'm from the United Kingdom from England But I live in America so that means that I've become a little bit my grand describes it as mid-Atlantic So I may use words that nobody understands I may possibly start sort of being half American half English in my in my responses I apologize. I understand that, you know, this might be a little confusing So please bear with me or stop me and ask me what I'm going on about the other thing is I like to have a little bit of fun as we present this stuff It's 5 30 which which is drinking time. So I'm I'm surprised. I'm actually sober on this stage But so let's have some fun as we go through these slides We talk a little bit about about scrum About its future about its past about its lineage about some of its challenges today and how we can make that real in Organizations and some things that you guys can think about helping us to improve in the scrum community So I work in an organization and with that with a guy called Ken Schwaeber Ken chairman of the board Ken Schwaeber has sort of had an interesting journey to scrum.org In 2001 after they signed the agile manifesto He found that loads of people were emailing him and the other signatures Asking to be part of the agile manifesto and they had no organization Concept or structure interestingly the rash unified process team wasn't emailing them. It turns out that was a bit of a mistake And so they created and he created and drove the creation of the agile alliance Now the agile alliance is really known for one big event right once a year and But it was inspired not to do that It was started to create community to actually take things like scrum XP and other things that were really key at that time And drive that and develop it and improve it. Unfortunately. It didn't really work out like that So in 2004 Ken realized that people like to make money and deliver value and and build Businesses around this agile thing that's part of its success and he created scrum alliance Now he created a very viable organization that a lot of you have been part of with scrum alliance in 2009 Though he decided that he didn't like the world of work and instead wanted to focus purely on software development And purely on some of the principles that he was developing at scrum org and he created scrum org That's the organization that I'm in that I run and when I talked to you a little bit about scrum Scrum org is really driving a lot of the content and ideas around scrum. So I'm gonna share some of those with you There's a very simple mission Interestingly scrum org's mission has nothing to do with scrum and that really is Ken Ken was like, yeah, we just called it scrum and I'll explain why later That's not what I mean. That's what I care about. Well, that's not what I care. Well, that's not what I care about What I care about really what's very important to me is actually The profession of software development. He's very very worried at heart. He's worried that we're gonna be Legislated that we're gonna be somehow a series of practices and and instruments are gonna be applied to us because we're gonna build cars That don't actually deliver on the mileage that that they meant to like some large German organization did software did that build What happens when the first pacemaker is hacked badly and kills somebody it's probably happened But we just don't know about it and he's really worried about the profession He believes scrum and empirical management is key to ensuring our profession improves So we build an organization called scrum org, which is the home of scrum now and scrum is used How many people use scrum in this room? Wow, and the others are obviously asleep, but the scrum 90 percent. That's pretty much 90 percent 90 percent of our job teams are using scrum today and that's probably that's a forested piece of data You know, there's a significant number of people every day applying those practices Those 11 things that scrums made of every day on their day-to-day work delivering amazing software Scrum org is heavily involved in this community There's are some stats bore you with that What is impressive though and I get impressed every every month with that number that number of classes and number of human beings that interact with us every month that are interested in Assessments training and being part of the community. It's really really really exciting and it's being practiced everywhere Vietnam one of the recent translations of the Nexus and we'll talk a little bit about scaled scrum in in a little while One of the recent translation next was Vietnamese. There's a guy doing Some really strange like language. I'd never heard of that's only spoken by Eskimos because he decides that it's it's important It's incredible the reach of scrum across the world But it hasn't always been like that has it now. I'm going to take you back 22 25 years ago for the people that weren't using rough or maybe they were using rough Remember those days remember the days when work used to be Decided on by a small group of people sitting in a nice ivory tower usually wearing suits I remember my first job out of university used to the guys used to phone down when you could take your jacket off Of course, everybody had taken their jacket stuff when you put them on when they reappeared But but that was the kind of world that we lived in and they decided their needs It would be business analysts would talk to them Maybe if they're very lucky or talk to somebody that talked to them those requirements would be grouped up and then then delivered This waterfall life cycle interestingly waterfall was a term coined by a guy called Winston Royce and He described it as not the ideal way of building software But just like all these things the term somebody briefly read the white paper probably You know like we all do because we're far too busy with diapers or maybe that's just me Hand one hand diaper of a hand software. That's always that's that's my pretty much My mission in life at the moment, but somebody just read it briefly So all water for isn't that sound good and obviously then the whole idea of management practices of water for Came came off, but there's these waterfall practices were very much in twenty twenty one years ago We're very much happening But then the types of projects change. We weren't just automating business processes We weren't just taking things that were manual and making them electronic We started to look at opportunities to use software in very different ways Innovations started to be driven by software. It started to be driven by our ability to do things in very different ways You can't actually do Manually isn't that incredible that a lot of our businesses that you guys work in every day if there wasn't computers There wouldn't be a business Imagine if the computer stopped working what the CEO of uber would do He'd be like Well, I can't even surf the internet and check my Facebook friends But you know he'd have nothing as Airbnb would have nothing in fact most organizations would would have very little And we'd end up going back to some Pre pre civilization age, you know when computers didn't exist But the ultimate idea was that opportunities and this level of complexity this innovation Drove a very different kind of problem space a Problem space that was very hard to really nail down in a very long word document that you put that was presented to you Once a year by a very disgruntled Requirements guy who just worked for the business guy who didn't really care about technology at all So we started to see a model that looked a bit like this where complexity of requirements and technical and technical understanding grew and That led us to a different way of delivering software that that problem this this this these Situations led us to applying different set of ideas because traditional techniques and And and technology and tools that were really being applied to it. They're applying robots to it They're applying, you know, not literally but the idea they're playing software tools like use cases requirements formal specifications Remember Z a mechanism of using mathematics to express functional requirements Wow, that was deep man, you know, I mean totally complicated stuff, but they didn't help they didn't solve that So there was a new way So Ken and Jeff Stumbled upon this HPR article by two Japanese gentlemen that names are totally unpronounceable by me I apologize and they wrote a paper that's probably the the start of it all really I mean, there's probably many starts It's like, you know, they're always trying to find the the start of humans and they're like, you know They got Eve and they're like, but there's probably an Eve to and an E3 and an E4 So they're probably multiple starts. This is definitely one of them and they did this analysis part of their doctoral thesis part of the researcher Harvard Business School they went and looked at these organizations that were doing very innovative product development They were building cars for instance that were fundamentally different This was Honda to anything on the road Remember that car that was very boxed in the 80s when all the other cars were sort of like round and odd looking And this box car came out like why is that? Is that because people wear big hats? Apparently not It was a very successful town car apparently people like to drive around in towns not in Bangalore You just seem to like to stand there waiting as thousands of things happen, but you're in a car Well, the Honda was one of them 3M was another and a number of organizations they looked at and they found these these six characteristics That were very you the very consistent in these organizations built in instability They actually Just told people what the goal was told these teams what the goal was but didn't tell them how to get there So they were very dynamic of how they were doing itself organizing teams Autonomy pushing the limits cross-functional teams where lots of skills are in there overlapping development phases there We call those sprints or iterations Multi-learning so you had the idea that learn by doing rather than by reading about it You're actually built hypothesis is and delivered it to market and got feedback Experiments work at the heart of it minor process controls So very little governance very light checkpoints. Maybe at the end of each iteration or sprints Organizational transfer of learning the idea that there are learning organization that fifth discipline that we that we talked about in the Early keynote yesterday They built these ideas out and they created teams that were very driven and Bizarrely considering that these two gentlemen were Japanese and they're not really famous for rugby They use terms scrum and rugby in this paper how bizarre though. They actually have got a Japan has got a rugby team It's not awfully good, but they do have one and so that was a better way Now those ideas were distilled and there was a long journey of distillation and experimentation by Jeff and Ken You may have heard of the FBI Sentinel project a key project that sort of like codified some of these ideas and it they're described in something called the scrum guide The scrum guide is the dinner definitive body of knowledge around scrum So it must be huge right must be a telephone book must be incredibly complex like the rupt was because scrum is being used By everyone in people using it build software. No, it's actually less than 20 pages You can read it on the toilet so quick and without staying in the toilet all day Not that I'm implying that you should be staying in the toilet I don't know why I said that but you could if you wanted to in fact I recommend you print it out staple it together and put it by your Lou you never know who could learn scrum You don't you really really don't you can imagine your wife. What is this rubbish? Where's Homes and Garden? That's the scrum guide her and that's what I do you do scrum you play rugby? No and So the scrum guide definitive definition of some very Interesting process a very lightweight process a process that concentrates on delivering working software frequently a process that has very Simple roles three has a very simple meetings three has simple mechanism That brings everything together the idea of a sprint that can be up to four weeks You can but not doesn't have to be the idea is that you have a daily scrum Based on the idea of a stand up where you stand up and don't necessarily stand up Actually, Ken doesn't believe in standing up. He shouts at you if you do so don't and if you call it a stand up You have to stand in the corner for an hour. So we do and we're in the cone of non-scrum No, not actually. I was gonna say not really but kind of really The idea the idea that you have a self-organizing self-managed team a team that's led and coached and helped by somebody called a scrum master Interestingly Ken and Jeff both think that that was a missed term. They shouldn't have used the word scrum master I think the popularity of the process having the word master and everybody wants to be a master. Hey kung-fu fighting and all that I Know I do even though it looked a bit like I was doing disco then The scrum master the key role that I that idea of the scrum master was probably the most popular thing and why it became so popular If we'd have put scrum master in the rope, we'd be at a rope conference now. I've decided I don't know if that's true But I always pretend that that's true. So the idea is that this framework not a method Method implies a level of rigor and prescription that this is not this is a series of This is a structure a set of ideas a framework in the same way as you build a frame of a tent and then you have to put the Tent around it It's a framework that allows you to build software in an effective way Allows teams to build software in effective way, and that's an important focus It's very much focused on teams allowing teams to deliver working software, and it's become incredibly successful We saw the 90% stat from forest stuff over half a million people trained in it Half a million people and that's just the ones that we actually take records at scrum alliance and scrum.org There's probably a million people actually that have ultimately been trained in it It's broke out of just software development, and it's applying in all sorts of areas now But just in software development half a million people have been trained in it There's over a hundred books I say over a hundred books because I was trying to count them and I after and I obviously I Stopped to be now to count when I got my Texas Instruments Calculator, and so at a hundred I gave up I was like Jesus a lot of books here with that we've scrum in the title not just in the content But in the title and let's be frank if you go and look at Scout agile framework you look at less you look at Dad disciplined agile you you look at these processes and at the heart of it not exclusively But for the lot of their implementation scrum sits there Scrum is at the heart of every approach that we do today and the scrum guide is open public Commons license you can just use it. It's available. It's free anybody can pick it up Anybody can use it today, and it's 21 years old. It's not quite 21 years old It's almost 21 years old because it was the summer, but it's almost 21 years old It's just getting ready to drink in America So it's about to get really nasty and who knows what's gonna happen, you know We've given it a curfew and not letting it text while driving, but but it's almost 21 years old So it's time to celebrate. I'm wearing my dancing shirt. It doesn't show the sweat. So I think we should celebrate I think we should rejoice in this moment where scrum has become popular It's driven agility into the enterprise teams are doing it building great software every day. It's time to celebrate. Yeah, no Jim Johnson chaos report very important I don't know if you're all familiar with Jim Johnson. He writes this thing called the chaos report comes out every year He looks at success challenged and failed projects. There's a lot of great data under this This is just the sort of like headlines, and it's not quite as bad as it looks. I'll be honest, but look at this we still have a Lot of failed projects. Yes, that numbers dropped from 2011 It's sort of go it does this every every year for some reason, but we still have a ridiculously amount of challenge projects We still have a lot of unsuccessful projects if you look at the data What you see is agile is actually a lot more successful. So that's good But not perfect and you also see that small projects are much more successful than large projects No shit Sherlock But yeah in small projects are an absolute nightmare. We all know that it's like trying to marshal Cats or in my case small children you get five small children in a room I have no way you just you just have to just step back and hope there's nothing breakable in there And that's true of most large software projects from my experience step back and don't give them anything that's sharp So so it's not so great And then there's this consistency problem that really worries me It worries me so much. It was the black and white photo, which is always serious If you ask 20 scrum masters What should be in a backlog? And this is just an example. What should be in the backlog you'd get 21 answers Why because you know what scrum masters are like. They always have a couple of ideas quickly consultant scrum masters Each consultant comes with his or her bag of tricks around and their version of scrum Well, what I see I like to do a daily stand-up standing on one leg find that key part of scrum Don't you know, it's really good good for yoga good for posture as well You know sitting is the new smoking standing on two legs is the is the new cigar smoking I don't know and they come with their own particular version of scrum. That's unique to them and Some companies have taken this scrum added it to their framework built really really big posters Nothing wrong with posters rope had a fabulous poster. I almost got a tattoo of it. Glad I didn't turns out But you know built these huge posters and huge documents that describe how they implement scrum thousands of pages of scrum That's a bit worrying, isn't it? So we've got a large amount of fair projects and we've got an inconsistent implementation of scrum and then There's water scrum fall now as an analyst of forest to research used to do gigs like this all the time I was actually good at speaking then I'm a bit out of practice I'm a bit rusty and I remember I was delivering this a presentation around the growth of agile in the enterprise I was very excited. I was up there. Obviously. I was wearing a suit. I was an analyst I'd been carried in by two guys, you know on poles. I was very treated. I was going to a five-star restaurant that night That's the life of an analyst Why did I leave no idea anyway? So and I was doing this presentation. I think it was going very well I hadn't offended anybody because there was no Scottish people in the room and We'd got a situation where I was talking about statistics about agile adoption and I made an off-hand comment about 60% of new projects are agile and the guy said Yeah, I don't believe you who's probably a tester not sure why we let them out But he was out there anyway, and he was standing in the front and he asked sitting in the front He asked me prove it. I talked about methodology. I talked about how we gathered that information and basically I bs'd him Because I didn't know I'd done a survey where I'd asked some questions around agile adoption But I didn't really know so we did a massive undertaking, you know, we interviewed we researched We talked to lots of organizations about really what they were doing We also used a survey as well and we found the majority of organizations were doing something that wasn't really that agile It was something that was kind of agile, but I could have called it scrum, but I could have called it anything But I coined the term water scrum fall You know, there was a large planning process that was mystical and magical and there was thousands of people were sometimes used or one depending on the organization and it created these huge Gantt charts and project IDs and all sorts of stuff Then people actually worked to scrum and there was different levels of maturity and and how good they were And we'll talk about some of those things and but it was you know They were using scrum and then occasionally when so when it when it couldn't be avoided Software is released. It escaped actually. I don't think it released You know releasing sounds like there was some very formal like intelligent good process It really wasn't it did the smell overwhelmed the people and somebody had to get it out of the building And that's what I called for water scrum fall water scrum fall was the predominant way people were building software Doesn't worry worry some worry some trend Really really dangerous and really really bad So okay, so scrum has been really successful though. So don't like that disappoint you know, I'm still going to have a party tonight I'm still going to get excited. I might even do some disco dancing or What that bang or whatever it is the the the Indian dancing which looks very exciting If you've got lots of friends, it must be quite lonely to do it on your own But really let's not get too disappointed But there is definitely some opportunities for the next 20 years as scrum Gets out Of the car it can now drive it can grow out into the world What sort of things do we need to think about and we need to improve some of these things are things that we At scrum.org are doing the community of professional scrum trainers the community of some of our friendly Organizations and academic institutions around the world are thinking about Um, and some of them are things that you should think about and I highlighted four more Four broad things that we should focus on When is around measurement one thing that scrum doesn't really provide us with is any real Defined set of measures in fact people often think that scrum is all about measuring velocity. It really isn't It's about delivering working software getting review of that getting that feedback into the process and responding to change It's about agility. It's not about About managing processes and getting data from that But we need to think a little bit about measuring We need to think about providing an environment around scrum that really allows us to focus on the things that are important That helps us get away from water scrum fall because our data is telling us that that isn't good for us You think about the people doing scrum. We need to think about professionalism We need to think about getting stepping back from from the Intellectual showing off that is so easy to do in our community You know that you called it a tomato. Well, I won't call it tomato I'm going to call it a tomato because that makes me sound smarter. Obviously. I'm English. So I am but the the point is Hey Come on guys. We did invent cricket And then you guys play it better than us. We did invent the English language and America uses it more than us But but apart from that We invented lots of industries that everybody else is better at than us. Yeah Anyway, so the point is, you know, we need to improve the professionalism We need to step back from the bs and actually start doing things in a more professional way You need to start thinking about how we do that how we how we measure that how we ensure that we're being professional The values that we drive we need to broaden the support for done Done done done done done. There was a really good presentation uh, that kicked all this off About joy and about the developers seem to have more phrases for done than eskimos have No That's a real problem in our industry You know, I how many organizations deliver working software that's potentially shipable at the end of each sprint Well, no, I can't do that. Can I I mean come on? I'm city bank. I'm bank of america. I'm this I'm that No, there's all sorts that you don't understand the complexity. No guys You don't understand what agility is it's about getting software out frequently. It's about observing that behavior It's about delivering value to your customers as fast as possible And it's about building infrastructure and systems and processes that allow us to do that It's about getting stuff out because we don't know what stuff really people want We don't know we need that feedback home. We need to respond to the environment You can't pretend You can't fake it anymore It's an embarrassment now Obviously, there could be it could be a staged approach We could slowly get there it could be an aspiration that we're all striving for every day But we need to think about done a little bit more I only think about scaling scrum and I don't mean scaling like safe. It's a very different scaling One of the biggest mistakes or misunderstandings around scrum is when you've got multiple scrum teams working on the same endeavor Working on the same project working on the same product I don't like to use the word project word, but I did just to appease a few people in the room The idea is when you've got these multiple teams So ken always thought that scrum would work brilliantly there and the mechanisms that were in the core framework were fine for that But unfortunately they weren't or they weren't well understood. So how do we add a little bit of rigor for delivery? Scaling delivery not portfolio management not release management not enterprise architecture Not systems engineering not all the other stuff the value stream stuff the business analyst all that no Just concentrating on scrum scrum. It's still scrum. But how do we make that a little bit more formal? I'm going to talk through these four things and see what they take us. Let's start with that measurement stuff How do we really understand how well we're doing? Well, it's how many people have been through training, isn't it? And got psm or or some other assessment It's how many people have have attended the scrum class or the or the agile class or the safe class or whatever That's how we measure success. It's burn down. It's all about burn down If our line is like this then we're all good, right? If it doesn't move you're probably lying if it doesn't move in terms of its gradient That's brilliant burn down defect density. That's the way no that isn't the way you measure our success Scrum and agile is about delivering business software. It's about delivering value to a customer a stakeholder an end user It's about delivering value So we have to understand that in some context and it's not just value for today It's also value for tomorrow and it's how often we do that So the three things that we concentrate on when we're talking about this now This is there's a lot of ideas. This isn't perfect. It isn't complete. But is this idea of ebm? evidence-based Management the idea that we can measure three main sort of collections of things Current value like how much value we get in what revenue what product cost ratios employee satisfaction customer satisfaction some sort of value thing that makes sense Ability to innovate how often do we get the usage? How often we change stuff how frequently we deliver stuff How often people are changing now that windows example of vista? That's that's the ultimate anti That's a negative number on installed you had more people on a previous version now Everybody's gone back because it was a disaster. That's probably not good. How often do we innovate? How often do we get quality products? How many defects do we find what sort of density? Do we find and then time to market time to market is crucial in this world? Because organizations often without the inertia and the legacy of some of the companies you work for a delivering software Much faster than you can possibly deliver it My phone continuously is upgrading software, which is very annoying when you're not when your plan isn't in the country You're at but you know release frequency release stabilization cycle time. How fast are we getting stuff out? Direct evidence is what we need to aspire for we need to start empowering enabling Informing our development teams our scrum teams with this they need to be working not in a vacuum anymore How are they meant to adapt if we don't tell them the value of the thing they're delivering? A fellow a fellow analyst and I at forestry research called Jeffrey Hammond went out into the field after Reading Drive the damn pink book. We write it over Christmas. That was before children So I actually did read or do anything else um We went out after reading that book because we wanted to talk to the organizations that were case studies in that book And we talked to a lot of them We found some things that were in common and one thing that was really consistent with every single one of those organizations Is the software development teams had a very clear idea of their goal They had a clear idea and a feedback loop. So netflix we interviewed the online streaming netflix. That was that was before Netflix was super popular in terms of streaming. It was still just starting and how are they measured? They were measured on people Watching streamed videos and coming back. That was a key characteristic that the netflix organization was very interested in They were also They were also Install time. There was all sorts of other things around the infrastructure, but generally they knew very clearly what their measures were And those measures need to live in context of some of the other stuff So this direct evidence dry is driven or drives some circumstantial evidence evidence like Defect density like burn downs like velocity like cyclical complexity other internal things that are very interesting as we start to understand the relationship between Direct evidence direct stuff that adds value and the circumstantial evidence the stuff that really drives how we operate an instrument Our systems that allows us to improve those things which drives improvements in measures Now, of course, this is an experimental world We will try things where we change the way in which we deliver We reduce our testing great example of something that a lot of organizations are doing today to increase time to market They're reducing testing time And they're in terms of user testing and uat and those kinds of testing But they're increasing their unit testing and their service light testing So they're using you know service virtualization number of technologies to do that We're removing the number of humans banging the software before it goes out So what you would do is you would maybe change that you would see the impact on Revenue you would see the impact on defects that customers are realizing you'd see the impact on upgrades and the like That's the kind of model that we need to put in place so that we empower scrum teams and teams of teams to effectively deliver value That's the kind of things that we need to think about when looking at when looking at providing measures that drive real Scrum teams so we can actually start really Changing adapting to deliver value Okay, so we talked a little bit about measures and improving measures. Let's talk about professionalism So here's an interesting question If you went into a hospital And it's a bargain hospital nice and cheap, right? And the guy you're talking to was like you went. Oh, where did you go to college, man? That's a usual american thing I don't know why they always say that but so when you haven't got anything to ask you say Hey, where'd you work? Where'd you go to college? Where'd you go to college? Oh, yeah I went to uh, I went to babson and did liberal arts Okay, cool cool cool and then you went to medical school. Oh, no, I didn't do that I was just a natural You know, I just came and I'm just gray and I've got my tight jeans and my tight So I'm making an analogy here, but I but I've never really built I've never really chopped anybody but I've got such a firm grip. It's fine If I was in that situation, I would probably say, yeah, no, thanks I want a doctor with lots of things on the wall I want a doctor when you google him or her you find that they're really got lots of, you know, they've published papers I want a doctor that's a member of more of those three data four letter acronyms than I can fit on one business card I don't know about you, but that's what I would But how many people have got software engineers that you have got no idea about that They come not necessarily from an engineering school. They haven't necessarily got the basis of experience They haven't proven themselves. They haven't got certifications. They're not members of professional bodies They don't attend organizations like this and and take and take pride in their work. What do we do around that? And that's not just because we care about the quality of our software, but we also Care about the productivity. These people are not as effective professionalism is necessary Not just because of the Volkswagen example or the obama care website It's important because it helps you deliver a lot more value A really good software engineer a really professional software engineer will be at least 10 times more efficient than one that isn't 10 times And that might be okay in india where you can have a hundred people so you don't have to worry about that But realistically is it I don't think it is we need to focus on professionalism and industry But when we do that When we do that, how do we how are we effectively doing that? You know when you form a scrum team who you're gonna get in it If you had a hundred developers, who would you include who has the skills? How do they prove they have the skills now there's an interesting development in the u.s I don't know if it's affecting india, but the github story The fact is you look at their github resume You look at how many times they've posted you look at how many things they're working on You look at a portfolio in the same way as you look at as a craftsman's portfolio. That's interesting But outside of their ability to build code Actually, how do you know they're going to work effectively in a team? That's an interesting question You know is scrum master certification cst or ps ps m Csm or ps m effectively enough does it really make any sense? No Probably not you probably need some more This is I picked these pictures because I too have been beaten by new zealand and I feel your pain So these are two very different teams As you can see the new zealand rugby team Damn them. Well, what else do you do in new zealand? Let's be frank. You play cricket or you do rugby I mean it is the summer there as well, which I think is a little unfair And our english team got horribly beaten in the rugby world cup by the new zealanders So I respect your pain guy And unfortunately our rugby team didn't hire the right people and some of the skills that they looked at were not necessarily the right one Including anybody that can kick the ball apparently So I'm a little bitter about this. So how do we do this? We have to start thinking about building a pyramid Inside your own organization building your own expert community one horrible dirty fact Is that you can't buy agility you need to build it from within yes, you can get help Yes, you can get coaches and mentors to help you But you need to build your own mentors you need to build your own coaches Look at lean and how lean is implemented in most large organizations And if you look at the toyota story the machine that changed the world What you will see is they build up these competencies. They have an apprentice model. They have a mastery model So the idea that we have consistent vocabulary that we know what's in the backlog that we know What what scrum means we have shared values about honesty and integrity We then add to that proven experiential knowledge We then add to that our ability to really mentor you can actually certify a coach A coach comes in with a proven track record their own github resume as it were and some objective analysis That says these people are effectively professional Now we're doing something. I'm not going to bore you with this. We're trying some stuff I don't know if this isn't perfect yet. We've got some experiments in markets at the moment around Expert knowledge tests and intermediate knowledge tests. We're looking at foundation knowledge And we're starting to try to build this pyramid Scrum.org is really good at the top and really good at the bottom And we're experimenting with some stuff in the middle to really try to help organizations improve that Some of it will stick some of it will probably change But professionalism is more than knowledge. It's more than your resume and github It's a little bit. It's about value The reason why a doctor never ever says to you when you say doctor. Am I gonna is it 100% certain I'm gonna live And the doctor will say well in this procedure. We only have we have it's very it's very safe It's got a failure rate of one in ten thousand Which is always scares the crap out of me, but but maybe I'm like, oh hang on What happens is there's 10 000 operations today and I'm the last one and nobody's died. Did you just kill them to keep the stat? um, no apparently they they don't but They're a lot more they have this they swear on a hippocratic oath Don't they they put their hand on on some religious document Actually, I know I did they put it on like a like their bag or something or was it a bible? I have no idea Or is it their their huge amount of student debt? They probably do that. I swear on all this debt that I will not kill any more people um So some values so interestingly this is hot off the press So the scrum guide is being refreshed at the moment to include explicitly these values Jeff and ken who drive the scrum guide. We just provide the infrastructure Are now adding these values to the scrum guide because they kind of got thrown out Commitment dedicated to delivering working software the idea of a sprint goal The idea that we're focused on delivering software that adds value to our customers We're focused But the one what is the most important not all the bs that you could do Openness we frequently expect inspect delivering stuff and we actually care about that We don't pull the wool over the eyes. We actually don't deliver it We don't do the sprint demo on our own machine We do it on this on we do it on master on a vm We do it on something that looks like production. We may even do it on production if you're really cool But that's beyond most organization We respect cross-functional self-organizing team. We respect the team We give it the ability if you remember the new new product game We give it the ability to manage itself based on the needs that based on a goal that we set And we allow them to have courage We admit we don't know everything we don't lie to our customers or ourselves Believing that if we spend just a bit more time on these requirements, we'll build the perfect software These values are very important to us It's at the heart of the agile manifesto and it's at the heart of scrum So we need professionals that demonstrate that they actually have those now one great sort of practical How do I make this real when you're doing an interview ask your interviewee? Provide examples but ask them to provide examples of when they've shown commitment When they've shown focus in spite When they've shown openness in an organization that just encourages lying When they've shown respect for their fellow software developers and how they make that work on their team ask them those questions And you will be you'll be surprised by the answers and you'll learn a lot more about them So we talked about measurement. We've talked a little bit about professionalism. What about done done done done done done And not only does it sound like a little song and you know, we just put a backing Singers to that we could make it really cool. It's really important and unfortunately we're in a bit of a mess So we're in a mess because you know today We really strive to have tests and hopefully one day we've automated testing with improvements in technology with improvements in how We work we're going to get to this place But really we're still missing a lot of stuff. We're still missing the ability to add the operation We're not building software that's exactly like or is is actually deployable. It's almost deployable And we're certainly not building it in an environment that provides us feedback in a business context doesn't provide us that insight Now this is an idea that that we've been banding around the idea that scrum teams and organizations adopting scrum Build something now the name is a little bit misleading. It's a ken name. So bear with me with respect to that I think it's but the idea is very insightful The idea that not only do you provide an environment that allows scrum supports the values Provides education and training and mentors to facilitate it You also start providing scrum teams with an idea of a scrum development kit It's really the idea that you encapsulate the the stuff you need to deliver done You provide a development environment. You provide a definition. Obviously you provide practices Done to done done to ops infrastructure tools. You provide architectures apis stk You provide development standards. You basically make it easier for teams to consistently deliver done And you build infrastructure teams or agile transformation teams or whatever you call them that help that happen The idea that we we fuel done and this is actually being provided today with things like, you know, some of the Movements of docker aws, you know, their virtualization stuff some of the new testing harnesses some of the new Development environments are allowing us to start building so you can get to that done faster So the idea is that you would you would do that because ultimately What we're looking at is this idea of today. We're in development tomorrow Maybe with dev ops as we sprinkle dev ops into scrum teams is make make it part of the nexus and make it part of approaches like and safe obviously and And just from that jar all do this dad do this they make this very clear But then we add measurement and agility and instrument Information back into the process and we get really done done. You make this make this work So we're measuring we're becoming more professional and we've done done If we can start doing those things in the next 20 years, we can really move us forward But what's really interesting is how scrum is scaling in organizations in terms of delivery There's a weakness in the framework in regard to how people understand and apply it at scale And I don't mean at scale in the way that lesson and dad and And safe talk about at scale. I'm talking about in scale of engineering endeavours The fact when you have multiple teams working on an endeavor the fact when you've got multiple teams trying to interact Where there's heavy dependencies Now dependencies kill software projects They they they really do It's that's just the way it is. It's like closing time in a bar Dependences are they just kill the mood and they wreck it where they wreck software development projects And so how do you effectively manage that with scrum? So let's talk a little bit About how scrum really works today one team doing work nicely done This is all the stuff they have to do to do that work You know, there's code the specs there's infrastructure. There's there's an ide there's all sorts of stuff So they work on that they cross discipline They they resolve the dependencies between each other using Insight like daily stand-ups daily scrums, dare I say I don't want to stand in the corner daily scrums They use that by inspection. They use that with things like backlog. They work together in an effective way. It's very transparent very open Groovy, it's definitely the best way of working. It's fabulous And everything's going great and you use a framework that looks a little bit like this In fact, it looks exactly like this. This is scrum Works brilliantly product backlog sprint planning sprint backlog team does funky stuff daily scrum Delivers delivers an increment in that sprint review There's a retrospective it feeds back we improve Maybe using ebm so the retrospective actually drives insight, you know, that's that's how scrum works brilliantly Oh dear That was when you got nine teams Get starts getting really complicated looks like a large blob When you're starting getting dependencies across teams, how do you resolve those dependencies? How do you ensure that transparency that works really well when there's seven Plus or minus two people in a in an organization Working in a very with a scrum master that protects them with a with a product owner that makes decisions That works brilliantly. But what happens when you've got multiple teams all stepping on each other, you know, branching from main continuously So it looks like some sort of national grid coming out. How does that work? Well, it actually becomes problematic So about about two years ago ken decided that this wasn't good enough and that the frameworks like Safe and dad and less weren't providing enough around the scrum stuff So he looked at the industry and he talked to our community the psts and all to the community at large and formed Basically this concept of the nexus the nexus is an exo skeleton to scrum It's still scrum. It's just an additional set of formality around The mechanisms for multiple teams to work together this idea and is it perfect? I don't know. Is it being practiced? Yes Have a number of examples because we also harvested this from people actually doing scrum Just because we didn't tell them in the guide how to do it with multiple teams doesn't mean that people didn't do it So we try to gather those best practices and bring them together give some words to help them For instance scrum of scrums is the most misunderstood idea in the world So we added some formality around that with the nexus daily scrum We added some formality around who cares about integration to build this potentially shippable increment this from the nexus Which we it's called the the the nit the nexus integration team. We added some stuff like refinement more formally Where did the idea of a nexus this concept that brings everything together? But you'll notice that it's still scrum. It looked remarkably like the other diagram It's just an extension of a set of practices. It's simple It's lightweight It's a framework that you extend your great use of scrum to help you when you've got multiple teams It removes that impediment Of saying we can't deliver working software because of that team that team and that team It brings those teams together in an effective way called a nexus And it fits nicely into Say and dad it concentrates on delivery It it actually is very similar to the way less work So the point is that it's not Instead of an alternative don't even think of it like that think of it as another set of great ideas That can help us work at scale in an in an enterprise very important so We talked about a lot of things today We talked about the success of scrum how scrum now is used by a significant majority How it's used throughout the world. We've talked about its success Also talked about how it's still failing. It's still not delivering on its promise It's not delivering on the dream that ken and jeff and the community around scrum built out It's not quite there yet. It's 21. It's done a heck of a lot You know, it's still well and it wears long pants and it you know, and it it could say hello, sir nicely, but it's not quite there yet The idea of four things where in the next 20 years Hopefully i'm standing here Looking a little bit older still, but i'll be bald so you won't know how old i am bald men will look exactly the same um, it's true It's great actually apart from every bald man apparently looks exactly the same which you say oh, you're like your brinner No, i don't and he's dead When i'm standing here in 20 years time And talking about the success of scrum the value that scrum is still delivering to the world Hopefully some of these things Are there measuring the value of agile initiatives adding that professionalism broadening support for done Providing a practical framework for scaling that it's just a natural part of scrum the idea of scaling The ideas around scale are just a natural part of scrum Hopefully that will be What we're talking about In in 20 years and that these are just natural to delivering working software and we're all incredibly successful Scrum is 21 years old Can you imagine the world 21 years ago flip phones? Can you imagine the world the internet was rare just like this hotel? um the Sometimes i feel like i'm 21 years old like whoa I've never seen a graphic do that I haven't you know when it's like downloading i can hear somebody in the back managing an aol account going Damn it room 306 wants more data. What are we gonna do? Phone another aol company great That'll work But um imagine the world then and how it's changed and how agile now is just a natural way of building software I think we're very lucky and I think you guys To celebrate your own success in doing that some of you not all of you because some of you look very very young But the the older people in the room You're the reason why scrum has been successful You're the reason why it is used everywhere every day your success and your energy and your passion for it has driven Its success into the enterprise, but we aren't done yet. You're unfortunately can't hang up Your scrum evangelist your scrum improvement hat and leave it at the door And sit down with a nice glass of whiskey You have to continue the fight You have to think about how we can effectively measure you have to think about professionalism You have to think about scale You have to think about all the things that we need to do to improve it to make it better And you have to work with scrum.org to help make it a success That's what I wanted to share with you today Hopefully this has been interesting. Hopefully it's made you think about a few things Hopefully it's not just one of these geezers that comes up here with a funny accent And talks about I know stuff Hopefully I didn't insult you because you lost against New Zealand a country of three million people and 400 million sleep sheep Um, they almost outnumber you in sheep But actually not interestingly they have less sheep than you have people. But anyway Um, so I apologize if you are offended by that, but they beat us. So what do I know? Um, but hopefully this has been a little bit interesting And maybe we've got time for one or two questions that maybe I can answer or I can use intelligent words to sound like answer about really answering at all Thank you Any questions comments 5 30. I want a gin and tonic. I know I do too really do Gentleman the rather nice beard over there So so the question I'll try to repeat the question if I get it wrong sort of shout at me He said so what so The history of scrum.org is agile alliance and scrum alliance and then and then scrum.org and why Is certification still a key part of your business? Yeah So the heart of agile is the ability to get objective measurement and of success, right? Everybody knows that we deliver working software so we can assess it You know, it's empirical We assess it and we get that data and feed that back And the reason why ken and and many people in in scrum alliance Concentrated on adding this idea of assessments was to provide that feedback rapidly to provide that objective now interestingly It was because martin fowler bearded Englishman You may may know him wrote wrote something after discussion on a plane flight back from I think it was Atlanta It might have been Dallas with ken. They talked about flaccid scrum. You may have read that piece Now that piece drove ken to say hang on a minute We need to effectively measure now if you've ever been on a ken course or a You know that you get your ass handed to you pretty quickly. He continuously tests you Tests your values test your ability to step back from what you've been doing to to apply things in a different way now ken can't be in every room and the 150 psts or the 180 csts can't be in every room every day So how do we effectively instrument that feedback? Well assessments and certification on the way. It's not perfect. No, it's the step in that right direction You know in in terms of the psm which about two and a half thousand people take every every month Um, we've got some very interesting data that allows us to actually reevaluate people's understanding of scrum It also gives the people the ability to understand how effective their knowledge of scrum around consistency and terms and words It challenges and gives us feedback gives them feedback And then gives some sort of measure of how good they are. Is it perfect? No, it really isn't But it's a step towards that idea professionalism in the same way as your doctor did a hell of a lot of tests To get to the place that they're in it's a step towards and hopefully over the next few years We're going to add more levels of certification and different ways of doing it like github like examples like people You know case studies that kind of stuff so we can start really driving out professionalism to incentivize You actually you probably don't need to be incentivized to do this but the average developer To really invest in their knowledge and their learning to encourage them Now, you know, some of you have got children in this room How many of your children wouldn't study unless there was a test? Now maybe you guys because you know this is this is asia And you're all really cool and into learning and and invented it many thousands of years ago and all that stuff Maybe that's not a problem But my experience is most kids without that come on you got you got to test tomorrow You better study some stuff now Do they learn stuff? Maybe they don't and you have to continuously do testing and retesting and other mechanisms to add to it But it's a start Yeah, but but my question was somewhere related to like You you have multiple certifications. I'm agile practitioner. Okay in the market now. I see like Save less dad than CS CSM PSM. So what it makes me is uh, you know my quality of Me practicing those values somewhere getting diluted, you know in running behind these certifications Okay, that's why we're so many well actually doctors have even more right So don't get me started on that. That's the reason why they have these really long like PMMCQ CSGGP So um, so some of it is just a natural competition to keep us true So having having you know the scrum alliance versus scrum.org. That's good because it drives Sort of like trying to improve the profession around scrum And then there's additional skills that we can't test for everything. We can't be experts in every field We know scrum We know empirical management. We know the practices of scrum and nexus. We understand how that works. We can test you on that But there's some other group of people sitting over there that really know Say And know how that works and they can test you on that they can teach you test you they can get case to these examples They can drive that they can look for different skills Now how many should there be? I don't know we live in a society Of chaos, you know, we there's a certain but hopefully over time the markets will decide certain What's important and what isn't but even if they don't that aspiration just by learning different things by trying different things By trying to test that knowledge makes you better Hopefully you've always learned something in every process of doing those certifications. It's not perfect But it definitely steps us in the right direction. What I don't want is the SATs for software development One ridiculously hard test that's managed by the government a government entity that's accountable to nobody The beauty of the most of the organizations that are doing assessment today is they are accountable They're accountable to their to their members. They're accountable to their revenue They're accountable. So it gives some level of feedback. So that's a different approach, but hopefully it works Thanks Answered your question. That was a tricky one don't like that any nice easy questions like How do you stay so young looking and attractive? It's hard. I'll tell you yoga drinking large amounts of beer shouting at the french and scots Um, any other questions comments about scrum? I think we'll quickly wrap up. Uh, we need to set up the stage for the musical event. Oh, it's time. Yep So I'm sure you'll be around and if uh, davis around and if people have more questions Come and see us at the booth. Yeah, exactly