Jeremy Thomas posted a very cool presentation about SCRUM in his Agile Development blog post. We use SCRUM to develop products here at OpenLogic and I don't think that I'll ever use another development methodology. I've worked in waterfall, spiral, and rapid iteration environments, but nothing compares to the ease and efficacy of SCRUM.

As product manager, it's my job to make sure that the efforts of our hard-working & brilliant engineers are channeled correctly.  This means solving the right problems, for the right people, in the right manner.  By recognizing that software development is a complex and unpredictable process, largely relying upon empirical controls, SCRUM makes my job much easier.  SCRUM avoids scope creep, the death march, the blame game, and many other ugly situations that most the software development world have come to accept as part of the job.

As I consider life after OpenLogic (shudder the thought but all good things do come to an end), I've been meaning to put together a SCRUM presentation that I could use to sell a future employer on SCRUM. Jeremy has done an admirable job. Maybe I can talk him into putting it into a portable format and distributing it under an open source license…