My life of Scrum (did not start with Scrum)

Scrum turns 25 in October 2020. Hip hip hooray!

It is a good opportunity to share a few highlights from the past 17 years of my life as an independent Scrum Caretaker — of “My life of Scrum” (since 2003).

September 2003. The founding managers of our company ask me to have a look at the challenge of delivering the (Java-based) core server platform for a large digital television implementation (one of the first in Europe at a bigger scale). Due to longer negotiations and delayed sign-offs, the project is already late before the real work has even started. Two software architects give me a 15-minutes introduction of eXtreme Programming. I fall for it. Completely. The urgency and feeling of crisis is also such that we are allowed to start applying it. We throw away all existing plans, create an ordered pile of User Stories, get together a great gang of developers, and go to work in iterations of 3 weeks. We apply eXtreme Programming all the way. Later, we add Scrum to our approach. Scrum cannot be applied effectively without clear and agreed development practices and standards in place.