What Is Scrum?
One of the many reasons that I like working at Atalasoft it that the company is open to creativity, and open to creative change. We have regular staff meetings that were OK. You know, you mostly sit and take them in, but really not a lot of people were invested in the meeting. This kind of meeting grows tiresome over time. It becomes something you should do or something that you have to do, rather than something to anticipate and to enjoy.
Christina, our resident Jill of all Trades made the move to put the responsibility of the meeting in the hands of the masses instead of strictly in the hands of management. It’s made the meetings so much better. At the previous meeting, she and Eric prepared a slide show about how we prepare for trade shows. Seeing this, I thought that it would be good to show engineering process as well. Here a video about the Atalasoft Engineering Scrum Process that I put together:
A few notes:
- I let most of the participants choose a stuffed animal from a collection pilfered from my kids to represent themselves. I say most because in the case of Rick, he accepted my strong suggestion of using a dinosaur because of a gestural commonality. Thanks Rick.
- I thought stuffed animals would be better than requiring my team to act. I’m not saying that they couldn’t – merely that we didn’t hire people for their acting abilities.
- In our eagerness, several of us forgot the standard Scrum presentation script, “Yesterday I ______. Today I will ______. (My impediment(s) is/are _____.)”
- The video was shot on a Canon MiniDV camera and edited with Sony Vegas. The shooting took all of 45 minutes. It took me about 4.5 hours to do the editing. I enjoy video, but I’m neither a director nor a video editor by a long shot.
- Thanks to everyone who participated and especially to Elaine for being a puppeteer for Dave.