Professional Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010

FOREWORD

Agile was always something you could be before it was a particular process you could do. And it was always possible for a team to line up in a tight formation and move together in mutual support toward a goal. Teams performed scrum behaviors long before there was the proper name, Scrum, and long before there were any specified Scrum roles and terminology or any particular Scrum prescribed deeds to be done.

Just ask the Romans.

So before there was Agile, there was agility, and before there was Scrum, there were teams living and breathing scrumish essence. It is good to remember this. Beginning in 1992, I was part of just such an agile, scrumish team, the original Visual C++ team at Microsoft, a truly great software team that pioneered many of the ways a software team could show actual agility. The number and extent of this team's accomplishments are staggering and have been pretty thoroughly documented elsewhere. No real history of software development processes and/or teamwork can safely ignore a team that was surely among the most agile of all commercial software teams.

In a period of about four years, this team, using specific agility-demanding-and-exploiting techniques, coalesced almost like magic and went on — in a sequence of increasingly impressive product releases — to reduce its previously victorious competition to a memory and to set business, technical, and process standards that define key aspects of the programming and general software development environment ...