The Professional Scrum Team

The Scrum Framework comprises eleven rules based on empirical process control. These rules can easily be described and understood, but they can be extremely challenging for teams to implement. The Professional Scrum Team helps real-world teams bring Scrum rules to life in their everyday work.

 

Leading Scrum.org consultants and trainers Peter Götz and Uwe M. Schirmer bring together proven practices based on their real-life experience working in (and with) real Scrum teams. They show how Scrum teams can optimize their performance as teams, and how each participant can work more successfully as a Scrum team member.

 

The authors introduce a team as it starts out with Scrum, and follows that team as it gains experience and functions with increasing effectiveness. First, you’ll watch the team discover that its legacy approach to developing complex software doesn’t work, seek a better way, and discover Scrum. Next, you’ll watch the team take its first steps with Scrum and gain hard-won practical experience.

 

In Part II, you’ll watch as it finds better ways to discuss and describe requirements to optimize stakeholder collaboration, so developers can create the right product. Then, in Part III, you’ll turn to development team practices and agile tools, discovering ways to continually improve quality and deliver functionality in ever-shorter cycles.

Peter Götz is a consultant, trainer, and coach. He began his career as a Java software developer in 2001 and moved into consulting in 2006. He is also a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org and has been assisting teams as a Scrum Coach since 2008. As one of the stewards for the Professional Scrum Developer training, he maintains and develops the course material and learning path. He is passionate about software architecture and DevOps and likes to discuss ways to improve the work Scrum Teams do by using modern architectural styles and engineering practices to improve flow. Peter lives near Munich with his wife and their three children, and only has hobbies that start with “b”: brewing beer, baking bread, and beekeeping. He tried sailing once but only could enjoy it when he realized he was sitting in a boat. Find him on Twitter as @petersgoetz or visit his website, pgoetz.de/en.

Uwe M. Schirmer is a certified Scrum expert, software architect, project manager, and requirements engineer. He has been involved with computers since the 1980s. After two professional educations, he studied computer science at the University of Applied Science in Fulda, Germany. Since 1996, he has worked as a trainer, and since 2000, he has worked as consultant for different customers and projects. Today, he works as an Agile Coach and Software Architect at Accenture | SolutionsIQ, where he helps to modernize organizations without losing sight of the product, quality, and architecture of their applications and infrastructure. His main interests are agile software development, emergent design and architecture, documentation of software architectures, DevOps, developing teams, and the evolution of organizational cultures. He lives with his wife, three children, and four chickens near Frankfurt in Germany.

Kurt Bittner has more than 35 years of experience helping teams to deliver software in short feedback-driven cycles, as a developer, as a product manager, and product owner; as an industry analyst; and as an organizational change agent. He is the author of three other books on software engineering, many blogs and articles, and is a frequent speaker at conferences.

1. Introduction
2. Requirements and Specification
3. Professional Scrum Development Team
4. Glossary
5. References and Recommended Reading