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

by Jeff Sutherland

there’s a hardwired limit to what our brain can hold at any one time.

The first is the time it takes to bring people up to speed.

The number of communication channels increases dramatically with the number of people, and our brains just can’t handle it.

everyone on a Scrum team has to know what everyone else is doing. All the work being done, the challenges faced, the progress made, has to be transparent to everyone else.

intense focus on the goal,

radical collaboration—arms

hunger to crush—anything

universal exc...

It was the Scrum Master’s job to guide the team toward continuous improvement—to

“What can we change about how we work?” and “What is our biggest sticking point?”

“Fundamental Attribution Error.”

Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery, by John H. Holland

We all perceive ourselves as responding to a situation, while we see others as motivated by their character.

Time is the ultimate limiter of human endeavor, affecting everything from how much we work, to how long things take, to how successful we are.

The sooner you give things to your customers, the quicker they can tell you if you’re making something they need.

The meeting was held at the same time every day, and everyone had to be there.

the meeting couldn’t last more than fifteen minutes.

third rule was that everyone had to actively participate.

I want aggressive teams—ones that come out of the daily meeting knowing the most important thing they need to accomplish that day.

team has to demand greatness from itself.

Demo or Die. At the end of each Sprint, have something that’s done—something that can be used (to fly, drive, whatever).

Everyone Knows Everything. Communication saturation accelerates work.

He used the Japanese words: Muri, waste through unreasonableness; Mura, waste through inconsistency; and Muda, waste through outcomes. These ideas are highly aligned with Deming’s PDCA cycle, which I wrote about earlier: Plan, Do, Check, Act. Plan means avoid Muri. Do means avoid Mura. Check means avoid Muda. Act means the will, motivation, and determination to do all that.

Quality Software Management by Gerald Weinberg:

The “Loss to Context Switching” column is pure waste.

“Dual Task Interference.”

a certain amount of effort is involved in “packing up” one process, reaching into your memory and pulling out another, and then running that job. And each time you switch tasks, that process takes time.

They don’t change how big the project is, or what’s involved in creating it, but just by doing one thing exclusively before moving on, the work takes a little more than half as much time.

multitasking not only wastes your time but makes you stupid.

the mean IQ scores of the subjects dropped by more than ten points when in distracting environments.

Doing half of something is, essentially, doing nothing.

that “Done” implies a complete, deliverable product that can be used by a customer.

If something is half done at the end of the Sprint, you’re worse off than if you hadn’t started at all.

It might have been better to create something smaller—something that really works.

too much inventory is pretty much the same thing as work in process. If you’re tying up a huge amount of value in things that aren’t delivering value, you won’t have those resources to do other things—such

The Machine That Changed the World.

The idea is that the process is being continuously improved, and that the right moment to fix a problem is when it is observed, not after the fact.

It took twenty-four times longer. 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.

if you do make a mistake—and we all make them—fix it as soon as you notice it.

Work too long, he said, and you get less done.

The peak of productivity actually falls at a little bit less than forty hours a week.

working late wasn’t a sign of commitment; it was a sign of failure.

“A lot of companies don’t practice [work-hour limits],” says Scott. “But there is a direct correlation. You get more done. You are happier. And you have higher quality.”

Working less helps you get more done with higher quality.

So there’s a limited number of sound decisions you can make in any one day, and as you make more and more, you erode your ability to regulate your own behavior.

measure output. Who cares how many hours someone worked on something? All that matters is how fast it’s delivered and how good it is.

“Absurdity.” You want to give your team challenging goals—to push them to reach for more. But you don’t want them striving for absurd, impossible goals.

“Unreasonable Expectations.”

A team that depends on regular heroic actions to make its deadlines is not working the way it’s supposed to work.

“Overburden.”