Scrum @ Microsoft Meeting

I spent last week out in Redmond visiting Microsoft headquarters.  I usually make it out a couple times a year and have a full week of meeting with different people.  While I never specifically go out to talk about Agile development and Scrum, quite a bit of my time is usually spent on the topic.  This trip was no exception as I had several meetings with individuals and groups talking about Scrum.

The highlight of the trip for me was a meeting held Thursday afternoon called “Scrum at Microsoft – Best Practices”.   It was attended by about 60 Microsoft team members.  Ken Schwaber was in town to do a Certified Scrum Master course and also attended.  There were four of us who did short presentations on our implementations of Scrum in different groups at Microsoft. 

A theme of my presentation was the need for the MBF process to have elements of both Plan Driven and Agile processes - a topic for a future post.  I also spoke about the key benefits of Scrum to our teams - Focus, Communication, Transparency, Iterative Cycles, as well as some of the key practices that we’ve tweaked in our implementation of Scrum.  I've already blogged about some of these practices and plan to discuss more of them in the future.  

Ken wrapped up the meeting by sharing a few words of wisdom and answering a few questions from the group.  Overall, it was a good meeting and great to see the growing interesting in Agile methodologies at Microsoft!