Essential Scrum Quotes

“Plan-driven development works well if you are applying it to problems that are well defined, predictable, and unlikely to undergo any significant change. The problem is that most product development efforts are anything but predictable, especially at the beginning. So, while a plan-driven process gives the impression of an orderly, accountable, and measurable approach, that impression can lead to a false sense of security. After all, developing a product rarely goes as planned. For many, a plan-driven, sequential process just makes sense, understand it, design it, code it, test it, and deploy it, all according to a well-defined, prescribed plan. There is a belief that it should work. If applying a plan-driven approach doesn’t work, the prevailing attitude is that we must have done something wrong. Even if a plan-driven process repeatedly produces disappointing results, many organizations continue to apply the same approach, sure that if they just do it better, their results will improve. The problem, however, is not with the execution. It’s that plan-driven approaches are based on a set of beliefs that do not match the uncertainty inherent in most product development efforts.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Scrum can be used for new-product development and Kanban for interrupt-driven support and maintenance.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“In some organizations both Scrum and Kanban can be used to address the different system needs that coexist.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“So, in Scrum, we are acutely aware that finding the bottlenecks in the flow of work and focusing our efforts on eliminating them is a far more economically sensible activity than trying to keep everyone 100% busy.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“In Scrum, we don’t work on a phase at a time; we work on a feature at a time.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“The biggest drawback to incremental development is that by building in pieces, we risk missing the big picture (we see the trees but not the forest).”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Incremental development is based on the age-old principle of “Build some of it before you build all of it.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Iterative development acknowledges that we will probably get things wrong before we get them right and that we will do things poorly before we do them well”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Cynefin framework”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“The sweet spots for Kanban are the software maintenance and support areas.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Scrum is particularly well suited for operating in a complex domain. In such situations our ability to probe (explore), sense (inspect), and respond (adapt) is critical.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Scrum embraces the fact that in product development, some level of variability is required in order to build something new.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Of course, there is one obvious thing we could do to try to improve velocity: work longer hours. Working a lot of consecutive overtime might initially cause velocity to increase (see “Overtime” in Figure 7.14). Figure 7.14. The effect of overtime on velocity (based on a figure from Cook 2008) That increase will almost certainly be followed by an aggressive decline in velocity along with a simultaneous decline in quality. Even after the overtime period ends, the team will need some amount of time to recover before returning to its reasonable baseline velocity. I have seen examples of where the trough (decreased velocity area) during the recovery period is larger than the crest (increased velocity area) during the overtime period. The end result is that lots of overtime may provide some short-term benefits, but these are frequently far outweighed by the long-term consequences.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Scrum makes visible the dysfunctions and waste that prevent organizations from reaching their true potential.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

“Scrum’s rich history can be traced back to a 1986 Harvard Business Review article, “The New New Product Development Game” (Takeuchi and Nonaka 1986). This article describes how companies such as Honda, Canon, and Fuji-Xerox produced world-class results using a scalable, team-based approach to all-at-once product development. It also emphasizes the importance of empowered, self-organizing teams and outlines management’s role in the development process.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process