Our Scrum presentation at Drupalcon Paris

Following our presentation at Drupalcon Paris, Philipp and I have received almost an overwhelming number of compliments and positive feedbacks. Thank you for those who attended the presentation and I am very glad many of you have found the presentation useful :)

A number of people have also asked me to:

• a) make the slide available online
• b) share the names of books I recommend

So for 'a', I've attached the presentation to this post.

For 'b', instead of sending everyone the links, here's a list of references I recommend:

1) Schwaber's presentation on Google Video:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011#

Ken Schwaber is the founder of Scrum and this is a introductory session on what Scrum is. Very useful.

2) A book about Scrum I recommend:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/...
In my opinion, Scrum is not difficult to learn, but rather it is difficult to apply it to real-life projects. Since each project is unique, a ScrumMaster needs to take into account a number of elements. Not only the technical side of issues, time or scope, but also the human-side issues such as politics and group-dynamics.
Scrum needs to be tailored to achieve the best result.

Since Scrum is rather simple, the chances are you pick up any book on Scrum and learn the same basics. The advantage of this book is that it doesn't only give you basic information about Scrum, but it also gives you a number of examples from his experience. He also shares stories of failed projects, which are immensely useful. You know how good lessons are accompanied by pain ;)
At Amazon, there are some reviews saying those examples are unnecessary but only there to stretch the page numbers. But I feel those stories are necessary for readers to realise how important it is to customise Scrum for each project.

Two things I would like to point out about this book are that:

• i) this book does not mention about planning poker and
• ii) one story point is considered as one-man day. While considering one story point as one man-day can be useful in some cases (which I might blog about sometime), many ScrumMasters I have met recommends not to do so. I should recommend you a reference that discusses this point in detail, but I haven't come across it so far. (If anyone knows a good reference, please let me know)

3) How to write meaningful user stories:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/User-Stories-Applied-Development-Signature/dp/03...
What is a good user story? What should the length be? How granular should it be? What kind of information should a user story contain? This book, recommended by my co-presentor Philipp, helps you solve these issues in detail. I have only read few chapters which are relevant for me, but it changed the way I look at / write user stories. Highly recommended.

4) My presentation from Drupalcamp UK
http://www.archive.org/details/DrupalCampUK
('Drupal and Scrum, an Agile Development Framework')
This is a bit more in-depth presentation of mine on Scrum from Drupalcamp UK.

Missing information
Some people also came up to us and said we didn't mention about some other key elements of Scrum such as burn-down chart. However as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, our intention was *not* to give an introductory presentation on Scrum. It was more important for us to discuss about Scrum in context of Drupal, from a company / freelancer's point of view.

Having said, I realised after the presentation that we actually totally forgot to mention about the most important point of our presentation i.e. *why* Scrum works so well with Drupal. Duh.
It is a simple story though - first, since Drupal is great for prototyping, it works very well with Scrum. Secondly no one has control over the roadmap of Drupal; thus making Drupal project inherently unpredictable to some extent. Sometimes really useful modules for your project suddenly pops up and cuts down the time required for development. On the other hand, it can make implementation of some features extremely difficult when modules go through a major upgrade.

Weaknesses of Scrum
Matthew Saunders from PingVision kindly approached me after the session and told me that the weaknesses of Scrum (doesn't work well with UX, hidden costs, etc.) which we discussed in our presentation was not uncommon. Glad to know we are not missing something important or doing anything awfully wrong :) But if you have solutions to the weaknesses, please do let us know.

Lessons learned
This was the first joint presentation for both me and Philipp. We both found it quite difficult to prepare for the presentation. From my point of view it was difficult because we have different ways of structuring and presenting information (e.g. Philipp's way was more academic, mine was rather casual). We also had to give each other an equal opportunity to speak so we found it difficult to split the presentation into two while making it consistent.

Another critical error was that, we were not using Scrum to prepare the presentation so we were working on it literally until the last minute. We also talked about the importance of timeboxing everything, but we didn't timebox our presentation that it overran by 10 minutes. :p

Nevertheless, I am so very glad that I gave the presentation. It seems it was appreciated by a number of people and also I learned a lot myself :)