Getting started with Scrum

Mike Cohn over at Mountain Goat Software has been in the Agile software development river since 1993. He's the author of the most excellent book Agile Estimating and Planning and really knows his stuff.

For those wanting to greenfield Scrum at your organization, he's got an excellent powerpoint slide deck to start from. It talks about what Scrum is and highlights the key things that you can use to show benefit to management. Mike encourages people to download the presentation and run with it, making adjustments as you need to adapt it your environment. The killer thing about this is the presentation is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. This is excellent for the Scrum community as we can go off a base from a respected source. I encourage everyone to join the bandwagon and help promote this by making it work for you. Scrum isn't a silver bullet, but it just plain works. You can grab the slide deck from here. Also available is a French version generously translated by Claude Aubry.

To add some icing on the cake, there's some great pictures of the Scrum process that Mike has made available of the process itself which really sums it up. These are great for decks or just print them out as a poster to hang in your team area to let everyone know the simplicity of the process. You can check out the picture files, also released under the CC license, here.

Watch for the Scrum tatoos coming soon to a blog near you.