What have we learnt today/ (day 2)

On the second day I’ve added two more questions to the list:

1. What will be the be the most valuable thing to you?
2. What is the most useless thing you have heard so far?

Here are the answers I've got (again not edited):

The Most Surprising

1. A typical programmer manages 4-5 hours of ideal work per day.
2. The actual Scrum Master role in a Scrum process.
3. No hard delivery target (just an estimation), we commit
4. Priority Poker.
5. using Agile has brought companies to a defect rate of 1 per quarter.
6. that sprints can be 1 week long including planning.
7. that people can be involved/do tasks which are not in their main expertise area. (a QA helping a developer to estimate).

The most controversial

1. the SM doesn’t need to be a team leader.
2. The option for terminating a sprint.
3. a team which managed himself for a long period of time.
4. Vertical planning Vs Horizontal Planning.
5. a team leader should not be the Scrum Master.
6. sprint planning should take into consideration expertise of the various team members.
7. that the team allocate its own tasks.
8. no defined time for system analysis. no allocated time between sprints for turning the story into a requirement document.
9. That SM has no authority over the team.

The Most valuable

1. Techniques for estimations, task allocation within the team.
2. splitting the work into very short tasks.
3. Priority Poker
4. Vertical Planning
5. Group estimations
6. not using buffers.
7. the fixed sprint content that need to be formally approved at the end of the sprint.

The Most Useless

1. A manager should “keep” a private buffer and should be completely transparent with his team.
2. not allow people to multitask.
3. too much QA in the process (i don’t have enough QA people)
4. The Claim that “The Plan is worthless, Planning is important”
5. Team leader as the SM of a different team.
6. picking SM’s which are not team leaders.
7. that the team leader is not involved in the process of estimations which should be left to the team only.

What amazes me time and again that there is almost no overlapping between the different answers.

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