Craig Larman - Opening Keynote Part 1

Craig Larman has been geeking since before most of us were born. Maybe not me, but most of us.

Now, he travels the world helping massive projects to adopt Scrum methodologies. Craig specialises in large, multisite, distributed and offshore teams. He is not a tall man, but in with his ultra-micro goatee and shoelace tie to match, he strides to and fro, no notes, brimming with confidence. He da man.

And then he launches the presentation. He starts with a weak joke and, horror, Papyrus as his presentation font. Red, all lower case papayrus.

Moving on.


Craig's best tip for creating awesome software out of a mess of legacy code? Sack everyone except the 10 best developers and start again. Cheers from the crowd, typefaces are long forgiven, this is the sort of thing the programmer elite of Europe (and me) have come to hear.

Everything Craig says is useful, sensible, Scrum 101 (his phrase, repeated several times) and it is. But to hear all of it in one talk is a real treat.

First up. Team members. There are ONLY team members in a scrum team. Cross functionality, multi-talented, constantly learning. I'm sold. I wrote some Java last week. That is, I cut and pasted and tried to understand some Java, but mostly I cut and pasted it. Today, I bought a Java book. (O'Reilys - 40% off a the conference). My early coding experiences were driven by "I know HTML 2. What next?" and learned enough Perl, Java, unix stuff, to knock up almost anything on the primitive web. I hear CGI and think of "bins", not Pixar. I'm glad I decided to specialise in JavaScript, and I do believe it to be the greatest programming language in the world, but when did I decide to specialise in it at the cost of all other programming langauges?
Craig talks about Master Programmers with 10 years experience. I have more than 15. This is what I should be aiming for.
We are offered a world of Lennonesque nihilism. Image there's no specialisation, no architects, no components. It's easy if you try.
An Agile, scrummy, self-organising team writing components is a waterfall team. It's all about the functionality.