ScrumMaster Training » David Alfaro: Scrum Costa Rica

18th January 2010

Costa Rica Agile: Let’s bring the revolution here

How the Scrum adoption in Costa Rica is going? How many software companies use Scrum? Which companies?

How many times have you done these questions? I have heard them many times.

The Agile movement -being Scrum the most popular manifestation of it- is having an impressive traction in North America and Europe. In fact, you can see some evidence of that by seeing this job trends chart of Indeed.com that compares RUP against Scrum:

RUP, scrum Job Trends

RUP jobs – scrum jobs

In South America, the movement started in Argentina, Brazil, now it’s getting hot Chile and Perú.

In Central America (no, Central America is not part of North America, and no, Costa Rica is not Puerto Rico) there is not a visible adoption of Scrum, except Costa Rica.

These are some events related to me that shows an increase of interest of Agile in Costa Rica:

August 2007, I was vital in bringing Stacia Broderick and Tobias Mayer for the first Certified Scrum Master training in Costa Rica, it was a closed activity for corporate upper management.
October 2008, Mike Griffiths came to give a one-day workshop about agile. I took him to give a presentation at the University of Costa Rica about Agile, it was a full classroom presentation.
September 2009, Brian Foote paid a visit to Costa Rica and we had a very insightful discussion about possible things to bust Agility in Costa Rica.
December 2009, I brought Michael Vizdos to do the first open ScrumMaster Certification Workshop [as far as I know, previous workshops done in Costa Rica were closed]. I was intending to have sixteen attendees, but we had twenty two and some in the waiting list for the next workshop in April. About eight companies sent people to get trained.

Costa Rica Agile User Group

On December 17th, 2009, we had our first meeting of the Costa Rica Agile User Group. Michael Vizdos gave a very customized and cozy presentation about Scrum. It started as a normal Scrum presentation but the audience quickly drove the attention to the Costa Rica reality: Scrum in a Near-shore Software Development Company. Michael has so much real life experience around the world so he gave us valuable insights, really unforgettable.

At the end of the meeting, we detailed a list of possible topics for future meetings. Just now I am pinging everywhere the poll [in Spanish] to pick the topic of the next meeting.

We already have our Google Group [in Spanish] of forty eight members so far. We have our location secured in Cenfotec Academic Center. Right now we are working in the website.

In future, we want to register our group at Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance and APLN. We now are looking for sponsorship.

Agile Day Costa Rica

After some talking with Brian Marick, Brian Foote and Michael Vizdos, Carlos Sirias of Pernix Solutions and Gilberto Medrano of Thought Works we finally get close to start to promote the first Agile Day in Costa Rica. We already got the venue, now the hard work ahead is regarding the sponsorship, but we are confident we can make it. It’s going to be a great event.

Now what?

This year is very promising for Agile and a lot of work lay ahead of us.

For me, this year my work will be focused in building near-shore distributed teams effective.

I’ll keep you posted. Stay tuned.

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31st March 2009

Collaborative environments to achieve goals

Many productivity problems I’ve found in teams are closely related to collaboration barriers. Really, any time frustration or problem your team is up to, please take the time to see if the roots of the problem is because your team is not fitting the following description:

A group of people come together, create a sufficiently shared understanding of an equifinal meaning that enables coordinated behavior, and then the actual activities of task identification, decomposition, distribution, coordination, and integration of outcomes are accomplished in a manner that lasts long enough for the goals [...] are realized.

That’s the definition of Collaboration as stated in Luke Hohmann’s article Some Answers to What’s Collaboration? .

Enforce collaboration. Agile practicesare meant to enforce collaboration. Think about it:

A dedicate workspace for team.
The workspace is in itself a meeting place, so anyone can convoke a meeting at any time without waiting for meeting room to be available.
The team is working in a circle-like distribution, everybody facing averybody.
Pair programming.
People participating in Daily stand-ups are talking to everybody, not only to ScrumMaster/Leader.
The ScrumMaster enforces a shared vision.
Openness in any meeting, specially in Retrospective meetings.
Shared agreement in decisions, even in controversial matters.
Reflect and Inspect what went wrong and right in each iteration (Retrospective meetings) in order to improve teaming.

Certified ScrumMaster Training

“Intensive and enjoyable at the same time”
“SCRUM is about people”
“Very intuitive and really gives you the sense that this is the natural way to go”

The latter comments belong to people who participated in our first Certified Scrum Master training in Costa Rica during the last week of August. We had the privilege of having Stacia Broderick and Tobias Mayer as the trainers. We really had a good time meditating and (most important) practicing all the agile principles behind Scrum.

What is Scrum?

I would say that Scrum is the natural way of thinking applied to project management of software development process. It enforces, in many ways, “working on your edge” in order to “achieve reliable innovation” as stated in the wonderful book Artful Making, of Rob Austin and Lee Devin. Similarly, Alistair Cockburn says in the book Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game that “Scrum tells people to think for themselves”.

By my own experience, Scrum is the right process for software development based in Cooperation, Communication, Courage and Accountability. That list would augmented by Stacia Broderick (remembering what she emphasized in the training) with the following values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, Courage and Trust. On the other hand, Tobias Mayer was clear in this important point: “Scrum is a Collaborative Space involving developers and customers in ongoing dialog.”

The trainings

A nice feature of Scrum, is that you are able to apply it also in things not related to software. Successful Project Management in general requires commitment and the agile factor: Inspect and Adapt boosted by iterative cycles. In August, two private/closed Scrum trainings were held, the first one was directed to top executives of different software companies and the second one was directed to software developers and project managers.