The Elements of Scrum

On an agile project, you build the important bits first, and the ones you never get to are the ones you needed the least. Features that reveal themselves to be superfluous or just plain silly can fall off the backlog naturally,

Test as you go, not at the end—a bug fixed now is cheaper than one that has had a chance to propagate through a system for months. Deliver product early and often, as only by demonstrating working software to your customer can you find out what they really want.

You may well have a brilliant architect on your agile team, but on a scrum team, she is not “The Architect.” The team will value her expertise as an important resource and often look to her for guidance. The architecture will have her fingerprints all over it, but she won’t be “in charge of the architecture.” The team shares that responsibility equ

product owner does this by directing the team toward the most valuable work, and away from less valuable work. That is, the product owner controls the priority order of items in the team’s backlog.

Change control can only work in a context in which change is actually controllable.

the pressure had also made him a bit of a bogeyman in the eyes of his fellows.

“We have been designing complex systems whose active components are variable and highly non-linear components called people, without characterizing these components or their effect on the system being designed,”

63 year-old daredevil named Annie Edson Taylor decided to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel for no obvious reason whatsoever. She survived with only a few bruises and gashes and declared, upon emerging, “I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces, than make another trip over the falls.”

This vision encompasses who the product is being built for, why they need it, and how they will use it. It informs all of the many decisions that must be made in order to make the product a reality.