Friday, April 17, I spent the day at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and I had a blast. In the morning I held a two hour workshop on the Principles of Scrum. Over lunch I gave a talk titled "Secrets of Scrum Success", and I spent the afternoon talking to a student software engineering group and to various faculty members. It was a terrific day and I want to thank Professor Jim Vallino for making it all possible.

My visit was part of the ViSE - Voices in Software Engineering - program. RIT is interesting in that it has both Computer Science and Software Engineering programs. The SE program focuses a little more on teamwork and practical software engineering issues while the Computer Science program is more about traditional design and programming concerns. So the SE students and faculty are already interested in project management and teamwork. They even have a course in Agile Project Management!

I tried something different with the workshop. It was based around some of the exercises that we do in many Certified Scrum Master courses. Each exercise tries to emphasize and demonstrate one or two scrum concepts in a dramatic and obvious way, and the idea for the workshop was to emphasize a deep and visceral experience of a few basics rather than trying for the more common overview. So we spent a couple of hours exploring self-organization and command-and-control and velocity measurement. As usual, everything took longer than I expected and we didn't get to do everything I wanted, but I think the people that were there took away a good feel for some important underlying principles.

The talk continued that theme by analyzing scrum using the seven principles of Lean software development. At the end, I proposed that the root of why scrum works is contained in these things:

    ◆    One-piece flow
    ◆    Self-organizing teams
    ◆    Tight feedback loops
    ◆    Transparency

A video of the talk is available here: Secrets of Scrum Success.

After the talk and workshop, I spent an hour with the students of the RIT Society of Software Engineers, which is the group that sponsored my visit. They're a great bunch of students who are very proud of the differences between them and their Computer Science colleagues. They were very interested in Agile, and many of them had tried scrum when they worked on some large class projects. I really liked their passion and curiosity.

So, all in all, it was a great day. I got to talk about scrum to students, professors, and industry professionals. I had pizza and I was presented with an excellent RIT sweatshirt. I really can't think of any way the day could have been better.