The next session is Rowan Bunning talking about Scrum - Rowan's the Product Manager for SwS, so methodology is something he'd be interested in.

Rowan started with Wizard (from which SwS was spawned). They've been a Smalltalk shop for the last decade, and he's been in the Information Services group (one of 5 there). They made a move from bespoke applications to products awhile back.

He learned about Scrum from Scott Ambler's presentation at the 2003 Smalltalk Solutions - he's become a Scrum Master and Mentor since. Scrum is used extensively at Wizard and Software with Style now. Why?

Scrum has executive backing at Wizard, and it delivers positive reinforcement to the developers. Smalltalk works really well for rapid development, which makes it even better.

Scrum uses a defined process - you try to make reality follow an upfront plan. It's also empirical - you continually adapt and adjust based on how things are going.

There are three Scrum roles:

• Product Owner - represents customer, users
• Scrum Master - guides process
• Scrum Team - 5- 10 people - multi-disciplinary, builds product - self organizing

At Wizard:

• 2 Week Sprints
• 2-4 hour reviews and meetings
• retrospectives integrated into review
• task allocation often left open
• testing on development server - bug reports from tool
• transition to QA server - formal change tracking

The rest of this session was a walk through of how they might take a task and move it through the cycle. An excellent point made: Avoid Critical Risk Tasks at the End of a Project. Words to live by in product development :)

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