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2011
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Notes from the Berlin Scrumtisch (August 2011)

Notes from the Berlin Scrumtisch (August 2011)

16 August 2011 ralfkruse81

Another great Scrumtisch in Berlin Friedrichshain in a new location - 100Wasser. Various peoples from different companies and backgrounds interested in participating in discussions on Scrum came together. The hottest topic was the merging of Scrum with Kanban, but we also talked about the Sprint to Zero Problem and How ...

Ralf Kruse
I'm an agile42 coach. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes I feel more like Marvin ;-) Follow me @ralfhh

On: 16 August 2011
In: Scrumtisch Berlin
Tags: Kanban, Scrum, scrumtisch

As usual we started collecting topics (timeboxed to five minutes). The list according to your votes (in brackets) was as follows:

Experiences with Scrum and Kanban (14)
Sprint to Zero (12)
How to Fight Bad Scrum (11)
Stories and Epics - How far to plan ahead (10)
Distributed Scrum Experiences (8)
Which kinds of reports do we need in Scrum (7)
How to deal with / be a produckt owner and team lead (6)
Is it possible to frequently exchange members of multiple Scrum Teams (5)
Agile / Scrum in Education (4)

Experiences with Scrum and Kanban

Prioritised as hottest topic, we discussed how a Scrum Team can make use of Kanban techniques and the different strengths of both approaches with their focus on either Batch or Flow. The message was that you should not mix up things when you don‘t want to mess up things.

How to fight Bad Scrum

Big Companies want the efficiency but not the change. They often do something they call Scrum but do something similiar and when people with real Scrum experience join them, they are very disappointed. We discussed the difficulties of a Scrum transition, especially in a big company. The conclusion was that you should not call Scrum what is no Scrum.

Sprint to Zero

Not rarely, a team never finishes a Sprint with "0" Story Points. Is this good or bad? The lesson to be learned is that in order to improve, you have to take risks and try things out. Additionally, there is always something that was not accounted for. So if the team focuses on delivering the highest value as fast as possible, it is better to finish every Sprint with 95% of what was estimated and get better by 5% doing so than to finish with 100% and never improve.

Discussion 2 Comments

16 August 2011 at 21:08.01 Siamak Haschemi

Thank you for the organization! It was my first time and I feel 'infected' :)

17 August 2011 at 17:08.58 Andrea Tomasini

Hey, it's me again :-) I want to write a disclaimer on the way the ScrumTisch was lead this time... My understanding was that I would have had to play the role of the radical opinionated hard-liner, so I gave very strong and debatable opinions to be intentionally challenging.

Unfortunately I mixed up my role with the one of the facilitator, because I didn't understood that that role would have been played by Olaf (sorry for this) this time :-( So I am really sorry to have messed up a bit the whole thing, it's my fault as I didn't have the time to talk before with anybody at agile42 :-(

I will try to be more agile next time... ;-)