shahine.com/omar/

I love this post by Brad Wilson on Scrummerfall.

The worst case scenario, in my experience, is embedding Waterfall inside of Scrum. This often manifests in what I call the One-Two-One pattern: one week of design, two weeks of coding, one week of test and integration. I've yet to see a team that was long term successful with such a system, especially if they are strongly rooted in historical Waterfall. As often as not, they will abandon Scrum after just a few sprints, claiming that it failed to provide anything but pain. Worse, that's often the extent of their foray into agile. They "tried that agile stuff" and failed, so they're sour on it.

I agree 100% with him here. When we set out to use Scrum for Windows Live Mail we were very conscious of avoiding this rather natural tendency. I say natural cause it’s easiest to satisfy the “detractors” from the new process by creating a hybrid of the old process and the new agile process. Don’t go there…

Another great post by Brad is about Canaries…

The idea is that there is usually someone in the group who is most likely to be the first to talk about the things that are going wrong in the group. They'll be the ones who complain when the code is not good, or the team isn't working together well, etc. They are your canary in the coal mine for the group, giving you early warning of problems. When things get really bad, your canary dies (er, it leaves the team).

I’ve never heard anyone describe things this way, but I also believe this… I have an idea of who they are on our team -