Book Summary — Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
3 min readJan 16, 2021
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Guideline to implement Scrum
- Several Scrum case studies
- Same as the Lean process
🎨 Impressions
This book describes Scrum elaborately. I have learned about the Lean process quite a lot. However, this is the first book that illustrates the Lean or Scrum process really well with procedures that are ready to implement.
🙍♂️Who Should Read It?
Anyone who works as a team especially product owner or manager.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
- I try to find waste in any process
- Find an opportunity to implement in my job
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
- Blame is stupid
- Waste is a crime
- Working too hard makes more work
📒 Summary + Notes
Why using Scrum?
- The waterfall method which uses the Gantt chart is not accurate, can’t adapt to change
- Scrum allows the possibility to fail fast and fix fast
Origin of Scrum
- Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
- Plan, Do, Check, Act Loop
Team
Best component
- Transcendent: Big goal
- Autonomous: the freedom to make a decision
- Cross-Functional: have every skill need
- The number of team member should be 5–9 people
- Don’t blame people. Look for a bad system instead
- No position within a team
Time
Sprint: Work cycle period (1 week — 1 month)
⏳ Each sprint must have a demo that can be used
15-minute daily stand-up meeting with 3 questions
- What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint?
- What will you do to help the team finish the Sprint?
- What obstacles are getting in the way?
Waste is a crime
- Do only one thing at a time
- Half-done isn’t done at all
- Fix mistake as soon as a mistake is observed
- The optimum working hour should not be too short or too long
- The scrum master will take responsibility to eliminate waste
Plan
- Don’t plan everything for years long. Plan only need during this period.
- Estimate each task size relatively by Fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13,21,…) to make it easy to compare task (Don’t estimate in an absolute term like week)
- Each member estimate task size if min and max estimated size is difference more than 2 Fibonacci order, the explanation is required before estimating size again.
- Work with story → state clearly who will get the value “As a [person], I want [objective]”
- Measure velocity in each Sprint bt summation of all task size done
- Estimate delivery date by velocity
Happiness
- Happiness found in the process not result
- Happy team yields a great result
- Measure team happiness by asking these questions
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in company?
- On the same scale, how do you feel about the company as a whole?
- Why do you feel that way?
- What one thing would make you happier in the next Sprint?
- Nothing should be secret
- Make all work visible on board
- Happiness is autonomy, mastery and purpose
- Complacency (not doing work) is not happiness)
Priority
- Prioritize to-do list (backlog)
- The product owner, who understands business, market and customer, will take care of the backlog
- The product owner set out “what” needs to be done. The team decides how and who.
- When doing a project, consider “change for free”. During working, plan usually change.