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Scrum & Agile Resources

  • Scrum.org A Scrum Resources and Training organization founded by Jeff Sutherland. Lots of great resources, including brief assesments of your Scrum Practice.
  • Scrum Alliance A non profit organization dedicated on advancing Scrum. A good source for articles and training.
  • Agile Alliance A nonprofit organization promoting Agile Software Development. While it's not dedicated to Scrum, it has useful and relevant resources


Scrumtopia - Making Scrum Work

I’ve been learning about Scrum since about 2000, when I learned about it through a paper Mike Beedle was workshopping at a Patterns Languages of Programs conference. I didn’t fully appreciate what Scrum brought to software development at the time, but I continued to learn, and introduce Scrum to teams I worked with, because it felt that the process elements we were using just got in the way.

I took a CSM course led by Ken Schwaber in 2005, and I began to appreciate that what the Scrum Guide says is quite accurate: Scrum is simple to describe and learn, and quite difficult to master. Scrum is more than just the events and rituals, it’s about cultural and organizational change from the team level to the management level. Scrum is hard because you have to part with some assumptions that seemed to work in the past, and you have to trust people to get the work done without a lot of micromanagement This is hard. I’ve been on teams that struggled with Scrum, and on teams that did well. Likewise I’ve heard stories from friends and colleages about successes and failures. The reasons for failure vary. And success looks different.

The idea for this site started when I was joking with a friend about how a company that had access to some notable Scrum experts was far from a Scrumtopia," and on a whim we decide to see if the domain was available.

I plan to collect resources that I found useful and inspirational when learning about Scrum, not to help people build a Scrumtopia – Perfect Scrum is likely an oxymoron –but to help build an effective Scrum team.


Before I leared about Scrum I wrote The book Software Configuration Management Patterns with Brad Appleton, which was reissued as a Kindle Edition in 2020. While we wrote it without consciously thinking about agile, it is a useful guide to Software Configuration Management for Agile Teams.