After two days of workshops, Wednesday was the conference day. Two sessions specifically addressed distributed Scrum: having teams, or part of teams, in different geographic locations. The presentation by Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland was great but also a bit utopian while the other, by Arto Vihavainen and Muqeet Kahn from Qvantel, was not only interesting but also very down to earth. Tobias Fors from Citerus had a very the best presentation slides and Henrik Kniberg told a great tale of Scrum and XP adoption.

Next year’s conference, obviously Øresund Agile 2009, will be in Copenhagen on May 12-14. Add it to your calendar right now!

Update Photos and comments from BestBrains.

• Don’t use TDD, it destroys architecture because it makes the programmer focus on individual methods, losing the bigger picture on the way
• Don’t bother with unit tests, they make a bigger code base (equal amounts of application and unit test code is not unlikely), meaning more defects! The system tests should be enough
• A subset of system tests that run in less than ten minutes should be used as a smoke test.
• For interactive systems he was able to unify Agile software development, Model-View-Controller(-User) and Object Orientation.
• MVC inventor Trygve Reenskaug was referred to a few times, and Jim told us that Trygve’s Data-Collaboration-Algorithm (DCA) was going to be the next big thing in software development! (This will be the seventh hit or so on a Google search for "Data-Collaboration-Algorithm". Maybe I should make a dedicated blog post about it.)
• Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are bad because they add new languages to learn when new people should work on a system, and it takes years to create a good language.
• UML could be used to visualize a system, but should be generated from source code. Quote: "No hand should ever touch a UML diagram."

Food for thought, isn’t it?

The list above is unfortunately a little short on things that Jim advocates but I need some good sleep before the Accelerated Agile workshop tomorrow and my writing would not be half as good as hearing him saying it.

The Scandinavian SCM day is an opportunity for people from academia and industry with a passion for Software Configuration Management to get together once a year to discuss SCM, exchange ideas and share problems.

The reason I tag this post with "Agile" and "Scrum" is that two of the presentations have "Scrum" in the title and I’m pretty confident that they are not the only ones to mention agile development methodologies in relation to Software Configuration Management.

The Scandinavian SCM day is held at the university in Lund, Sweden.

Either browse the slideshow or read more below!

It sure is a nice box!

You can almost become a Scrum Master only by reading on the back.

Removing the cover reveals The Softhouse Scrum Poster, stickers and a packet of blue tack. I will propose that the blue tack should be in the orange Softhouse color for future versions of the Scrum Master kit!

Next comes a whole bunch of burndown charts. They are also available in PDF format on the Softhouse Scrum Master Kit page.

The picture above shows the bottom of the treasure chest with two planning poker decks, an hourglass, a stack of index cards and an index card box.

There are also a couple of Scrum in five minutes leaflets, a User Guide and all task bord signs imaginable.

Finally, a sneak-peak in the User Guide…

For example, I would like to register the really neat domain name and aggregate blogs on a certain topic connected to the domain name. I have promised myself (and my visitors!) to make a price database for my energy drink site. I have barely started working on my so called Holiday Project. I have not finished the support for tags on my site Folkmun. I would need to polish my Instant Messaging to RSS system Esagila a bit. There are other projects that are postponed indefinitely. All in all, I really shouldn’t bother thinking of new projects right now.

This blog is another project. I could have been working on any of the above instead of writing this blog post! It’s all about what I give priority to, and I’m not always good at choosing. I probably need to Inspect and Adapt, as done in Scrum. Speaking of Scrum, maybe I should create a product backlog for my projects?

Me and my wife usually have a chat in the evening about what we’ve done during the day (”started painting the bedroom”) and our plans for the day after (”continue painting the bedroom”). When I realized how similar this is to the Daily Scrum, I smiled and started asking her and myself for impediments too (”we may not have enough paint left”).

I could call our common to-do list a “Family Backlog” too, if I wanted to take the analogy a step further… :-)