Scrum The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

Below are some of my favorite parts of the book: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland and J. J. Sutherland.

• "Scrum works by setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time."
• "…at the end of each cycle, there would be a finished increment of product."
• "This methodology allows teams to get near real-time feedback on their work."
• "The idea in Scrum is that the 'pigs' are the ones who are totally committed to the project and are responsible for its outcome. The 'chickens' are the people who are informed of its progress, the stakeholders."
• "Management didn't dictate. Instead, executives were servant-leaders and facilitators focused on getting obstacles out of their teams' way rather then telling them what and how to do product development."
• "Don't look for bad people; look for bad systems — ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance."
• "Sprints are what are often called 'time boxes.' They're of a set duration. You don't do a one-week Sprint and then a three-week Sprint. You have to be consistent. You want to establish a work rhythm where people know how much they can get done in a set period of time."
• "One crucial element of an individual Sprint, though, is that once the team commits to what they're going to accomplish, the tasks are locked in. Nothing else can be added by anyone outside the team."
• "And what happens if you're interrupted or have to switch quickly to another project, even just for a moment? You guessed it: that carefully built mental architecture collapses. It can take hours of work just get back to the same state of awareness."
• "If a bug was addressed on the day it was created, it would take an hour to fix; three weeks later, it would take twenty-four hours."
• "When people go on vacation, they are expected to go on vacation, not check e-mail, not check in with the office. If you can't actually take time off without having to make sure everything is going right at the office, the thinking goes, you aren't managing your teams well."
• "When you're writing your stories, though, you want to make sure that they're small enough that you can actually estimate them."
• "What are the things that actually make people happy? They're the same things that make great teams: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Or to say it more expansively, it's the ability to control your own destiny, it's the feeling that you're getting better at something, and it's knowing that you're serving something bigger than yourself."
• "Managers should also have zero tolerance for incivility and never allow an employee to poison corporate culture through abuse or disrespect."
• "The 'Wise Fool' is the person who asks uncomfortable questions or raises uncomfortable truths."
• "When you're surrounded by assholes, don't look for bad people; look for bad systems that reward them for acting that way."
• "What is the absolute least I can build and still deliver some value to a customer?"
• "It's often what the customer said they wanted at the beginning of the process, but in reality people don't know what they really want until they can try something out."
• "One of the pillars of Scrum is that once the team has committed to what they think they can finish in one Sprint, that's it. It cannot be changed, it cannot be added to."
• All quotes are attributed to this book: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland and J. J. Sutherland.