Scrum Gathering II

I have just returned home from 2nd Scrum Gathering in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Hosted in the the historic Boulderado Hotel - a past haunt of beat poets Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. A tip for frequent conference goers is that sharing a room helps cut your costs - Linda Rising was my room-mate. Unlike the first Scrum Gathering (organized in Vienna by Boris Gloger last April) the Boulder Gathering was an invitation only affair. I had not paid much attention to the invitee list so was surprised on the first morning to run into Ron Jeffries, Brian Marick and Dan Rawsthorne. There were also a few familiar faces from Europe there; Boris Gloger, Hubert Smits, Joseph Pelrine and Karl Scotland. After a brief opening session - when Ron Jeffries was dubbed in as a CSM (Certified Scrum Master) - not honorary as "he earned it by his posts to scrum lists". We separated into three working groups tasked with generating materials for CSM's to use: metrics, process and simulations. My group was "The Fluffies". Our task was to deliver a simulation that could be used by CSM's to teach Scrum. Our group was lead by Esther Derby and Jeff McKenna. We had a lot of fun trying out simultations but a key learning point was that debriefing simulations is essential (you can use ICA's ORID for this). We had great fun with Bill Wake's Daily Scrum role-play. Participants are handed secret roles to challenge the ScrumMaster's skills - such as noisy chicken, late-comer, disguised impediment, etc. Also look out for: * Alisha Yanik's exercise on communication with colored wooden tiles * Kert Peterson's "Empirical vs Defined" * Jean Tabaka's "Scrum 59 minutes" On the second day, each group presented their work back to the whole group. The original schedule had part of the afternoon set aside to discuss future plans for the Scrum Gatherings and Scrum Alliance but due to the over-run of previous sessions this was cut-short. Scrum Gatherings will run every six months alternating between Vienna and Boulder locations. Ken wants to be able to give compenstaion for work on web-site and organization rather than rely on volunteers, for this reason the Scrum Alliance is likely to be a for profit company with directors; Ken Schwaber, Esther Derby and Mike Cohn. The Scrum Alliance has yet to work out it's relationship with Agile Alliance (Ken was one of the people who breathed life into the Agile Alliance). However, the Scrum Alliance has a specific aim to support the growing community of Scrum Masters. Many of the Scrum Gathering participants are also XP coaches and as I am one of these I hope that the Scrum Alliance can embrace this community rather than compete with it. Going forward we should remember that the folk at the heart of this gathering care about spreading agile software development to a wider audience - Ron Jeffries wrote an article about Passion which I find a useful guide in this. Some photos of the event can be found here.