Back at the 2007 ESRI Developer Summit, I did a presentation on "Being Agile". At that time, I mentioned that we simply followed general agile principles, but did not particularly follow any doctrine. For a variety of reasons we have had to become more formal in our quest for agility, and have adopted Scrum.

For those not familliar with Scrum, it's a very light-weight project managment methodology that's based on agile principles. Work items are managed in a set of backlogs and are done in a series of 2 or 4 week sprints at the end of which they produce a "potentially shippable product increment. Here's a good diagram that shows it all. Every day the team meets for 10-15 minutes to repost status - this is the "scrum".

What's really nice is that there are alot of success stories that one can reference with "selling" Scrum within an organization and to clients. Not to mention a slew of great books. Including what I'd recommend as a really good intro to the topic  Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional) by Ken Schwaber.

Thus far, I have to say that it's the best way to develop software that I've ever seen. It's easy - nothing in it seems to be "extra" - to put it another way - no TPS reports. Things proceed smoothly, the team is all bought in, and we are cranking out the code. Last week my co-worker Chris Spagnuolo and I attended a "Certified Scrum Master" training course in Denver. Led by Mike Cohn (blog), this was a great two day class that covered everything you need to know to run a scrum team - aka being a "scrum master".

We liked this initial class so much that we are heading out to Orlando in September for Mike's course on Agile Estimating (here's Mike's book on the same topic and YouTube videos - part 1 and part 2 - of a presentation he gave @ Google in March 2007). We are really excited about this because it will be driven by the detailed historical data from our team's sprints and it should be more much more accurate than other "gut-based" estimating systems.

If this sort of thing strikes your fancy, Chris Spagnuolo (our "scrum master") has started a GeoScrum blog where he will be covering the on-going journey of managing a cutting edge geospatial development group with Scrum. We are constantly adapting the process and our tools and Chris will share tips on what works and what doesn't, as well as general project managment zen.