Three bloody roles, Scrum has, and only three. If you can’t get that right, don’t call it Scrum, OK?

  • Ron Jeffries

When we are blind to systemic causes of problems, all the solutions we try will likely make matters worse.

  • Esther Derby

If we have a fully defined backlog, we no longer have a true Agile Product Development situation. Instead, we have a project

  • Ron Jeffries

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

  • Martin Fowler

The fact is, when you look at the best teams - like the ones that existed at Toyota or 3M when Takeuchi or Nonaka wrote their paper, or the ones at Google or Salesforce.com or Amazon today - there isn’t this separation of roles.

  • Jeff Sutherland

First-time product owners need time, trust, and support to grow into their new role.

  • Roman Pichler

The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

  • Kent Beck

If you are the only person on your Scrum team that can do a particular job, you should be fired.

  • Jeff Sutherland

Any Scrum without working product at the end of a sprint is a failed Scrum.

  • Jeff Sutherland

You can’t be agile when you’re knee-deep in mud

  • Martin Fowler

If we try to hide the small failures so that nobody sees them, all they see is the large failures we can’t hide.

  • Yves Hanoulle

A sprint would only be a failure if the team didn’t deliver anything and didn’t learn from it.

  • Mike Cohn

If your team wants to propose a ’technical story’, I suggest they upgrade their skills until they no longer want to do that.

  • Ron Jeffries

DevOps is not about learning each other’s job, it’s understanding the money is made when software is actually running in production

  • Dave Mangot

…a team that gets really good at Scrum and another that gets really good at Kanban will be largely identical in practice.

  • Mike Cohn

You can’t solve someone’s problem with code if you don’t understand their problem.

  • Adam Haney, Bellhops

Being proud of 100% test coverage is like being proud of reading every word in the newspaper. Some are more important than others.

  • Kent Beck

Scrum doesn’t fix your problems. Scrum shows you your problems. You’re supposed to fix the problems.

  • Ron Jeffries

Remember: it’s not the documentation that needs to be kept in sync, but the people

  • George Dinwiddie

Goal: a strong culture of continuous improvement, driven from below and supported from above.

  • Henrik Kniberg

Real Agile is about paying attention to what happens, and dealing with it. Do that.

  • Ron Jeffries

Focus on effectiveness first, then efficiency.

  • Henrik Kniberg

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want.

  • Bram Cohen

Do the planning, but throw out the plans

  • Mary Poppendieck