This morning one of our fellow Heretics asked me about my opinion about scrum.
Ah… I love the smell of scrum in the morning.
In all seriousness — I am a big fan of an agile software development process. It allows teams to be nimble, it makes it easy to build products your users actually want and it allows for quick iteration, testing and refinement.
And it’s dangerous. As with everything — the moment you turn something into an overly rigid process, the moment you take something which is supposed to be lightweight and, well, agile and turn it into an enforced process with rules and regulations… that’s the moment you murder agile and make it no better than any other process (we’re talking about startups here, don’t forget!)
So: Forget your scrum master exam. Throw away the books which tell you that there is only one way to “do agile” — instead adopt a lightweight process which works for YOUR team. Define a lightweight framework which allows you to be nimble, to turn on a dime and yet deliver quality code and get hacking.
Oh — and check out Blossom, a wonderful tool for agile software development built by a bunch of Heretics from Europe. :)