Simon Roberts

An article, co-written by ScrumCenter founders Christoph Mathis and Simon Roberts, describing the Scrum transition at Allianz Deutschland AG, is now available for free download thanks to an agreement with SIGS-DATACOM GmbH.
The article, co-written by Gerhard Hastreiter (Allianz Deutschland AG), Chistoph Mathis (ScrumCenter GmbH) and Simon Roberts (ScrumCenter GmbH), first appeared in the January 2009 [...]

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At the German Scrum Open Space conference on 11th July, Christoph Mathis and I presented our ideas on sustainable Enterprise Scrum transitions.
The ideas are based on our experiences leading the successful Scrum transition at Allianz Deutchland over the last 1.5 years and identifies some of the key success factors and pitfalls as well as outlining [...]

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There are many techniques that can be applied during Scrum retrospectives. The excellent book “Agile Retrospectives” by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen has several suggestions. As a Scrum coach I try to keep retrospectives fresh and interesting by using different techniques and I regularly dip into this book for inspiration.
One of the simplest retrospective approaches [...]

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flow|state: Show mercy to keyboard users (yourself included) by setting the default keyboard focus In this post on flow|state the author explains the importance of setting the default keyboard focus in a web application – i.e. where text will appear if the user starts typing without clicking on a control or otherwise changing the focus. [...]

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In PairProgrammingMisconceptions Martin Fowler makes some very good points and I agree with everything that he writes. However, I think that there is an important point that he has not mentioned: what are the alternatives?
In traditional software engineering projects, there has been widespread use of peer review (design reviews, code inspections, code walkthroughs etc.) as [...]

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In April of this year it was announced that Toyota had overtaken General Motors as the largest manufacturer of automobiles in the world in terms of vehicles sold. It seems that they will maintain this lead for some time to come. Interesting, a Toyota representative played down the achievement stating that they were focussed on [...]

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I recently led a test-driven development (TDD) workshop for the team that I am currently coaching. We’ve been working together for several Sprints (every Sprint bar none has resulted in valuable functionality that has been put into production). We’ve previously looked at unit tests in detail and I had made a strong recommendation to try [...]

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I was recently invited to do another talk on agile methods at the Center for Digital Technology and Management in Munich, Germany.
This time, the talk covered the following areas:

user stories
agile estimating and planning

After examining some of the characteristics of good user stories, the students practiced writing some (with “As a …, I want …, so [...]

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I was recently invited to talk about Scrum and SOA at the Center for Digital Technology and Management in Munich, Germany. The CDTM is a partnership between two Munich universities and cooperates closely with industry. It’s aim is to “prepare the students for future leadership positions in their professional career.”
The talk was provided as a [...]

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As a Scrum coach and practitioner, I find that Scrum itself, backed up by my experience, provides most of the guidance that I need to advise clients during agile transitions. However, sometimes it is useful to look at other flavours of agile. Lean Software Development, which shares a common ancestry with Scrum in that they [...]

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