6 Baseline questions regarding scrum

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1. What’s your elevator pitch for Scrum and agile software development techniques?
1. Help people build software in 30 days or less.
2. When you were initially coming up with these concepts, did you ever envision that the methods would become as pervasive as they have?
1. We, (Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber) came up with it for our own survival, and then we experimented with it in a number of companies that we were in. I would have never guessed. But I view Waterfall as the worst thing that ever happened to our profession, ever. So I’m delighted that it happened.
3. Why was Waterfall the worst thing that ever happened to the profession?
1. It starts with the expectation that you can take complex technology, people, and changing requirements, and you can predict exactly what they’ll be a far point in advance, and you put someone in charge of it that tries to maintain and stick to that plan. 
4. Are Agile and Scrum techniques equally applicable to other areas of business, and life?
1. David Starr runs his family using daily Scrums and weekly planning meetings (PDF). A sales operation is run by Scrum. They lay out the yearly goal, and then every month they lay out what they’re going to try to do, they look and see what they were able to accomplish, they adjust the business accordingly, then they move forward. The only thing that wasn’t done with an emperical, iterative or incremental approach was software! Which is the most complex of them all. It’s so weird.
5. What’s the biggest mistake that a company makes, or a software development team makes, in trying to implement these principles?
1. We’re trained in our organizations to believe that there’s someone in charge, who has people working for him, and he can tell people to do things and it will happen.
2. Companies think that people’s creativity can be mandated.
3. The hardest thing is to get the manager to see that his or her job is to see, what is the best the team can do, and help them do it, rather than get them to do what the manager thinks they should do. Anyone who’s been a parent knows exactly this problem with their kids.
6. How do you balance the need to collaborate with the need to concentrate?
1. People think opening up space and letting the noise vibrate is collaboration. Having people so you can see them, and go over and start writing on a board, or you can get the people you need right there, that is collaboration. There’s often a mistake that this ominous noise is collaboration. Visual cues and access are the keys.