23 Quotes by Jeff Sutherland

Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.

Number of Simultaneous Projects Percent of Time Available per Project Loss to Context Switching 1 100% 0% 2 40% 20% 3 20% 40% 4 10% 60% 5 5% 75%.

Greatness can’t be imposed; it has to come from within. But it does live within all of us.

Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20 percent first. Often by the time they’re done, they realize they don’t really need the other 80 percent, or that what seemed important at the outset actually isn’t.

The Scrum Master, the person in charge of running the process, asks each team member three questions: 1. What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint? 2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint? 3. What obstacles are getting in the team’s way? That’s it. That’s the whole meeting.

Trying to restrict a human endeavor of any scope to color-coded charts and graphs is foolish and doomed to failure. It’s not how people work, and it’s not how projects progress.

At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? And question whether there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and what might be keeping you from doing that.

It was the Scrum Master’s job to guide the team toward continuous improvement – to ask with regularity, “How can we do what we do better?” Ideally, at the end of each iteration, each Sprint, the team would look closely at itself – at its interactions, practices, and processes – and ask two questions: “What can we change about how we work?” and “What is our biggest sticking point?” If those questions are answered forthrightly, a team can go faster than anyone ever imagined.

In software development there’s a term called “Brooks’s Law” that Fred Brooks first coined back in 1975 in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Put simply, Brooks’s Law says “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”8 This has been borne out in study after study.