Customer Reviews

ScrumButs: The Dangers of Customizing Scrum

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This is a 60-minute recording of a conference call with Ken Schwaber, as interviewed by Kevin Aguanno. I feel this could be better, because while Kevin does keep the discussion going, I feel it would be better if Kevin had actually challenged some of the "opinions as fact" that come from Ken and other Scrum evangelists. Listen to the CD and you'll understand what I mean. From this CD, I don't get the feeling that Kevin has much substantive Scrum experience, so why he's interviewing Ken is not clear to me. I do think this CD is worth a listen, although the twenty dollar price is debatable. In future, lets get to the point immediately, since we've already heard the history of Scrum and what Scrum is about and how Scrum is simple. The substantive material doesn't really start until 19 minutes in. For example, at around 20:00, Ken quickly lists about a dozen ScrumButs...but we don't get much explanation of why they are bad for Scrum, since Kevin never challenges anything Ken says. (For example, Ken states that "Waterfall" ruined our profession, which is a trendy opinion, but is nonsense considering the enormous successes of many Waterfall projects. Ken then describes about "55 % using Agile, with 45% using Waterfall". Okay...so what happened to all the other methodologies? And where did that statistic come from?)

I am a CSM, and it is great to finally have an audio resource on Scrum. I wish there was more.