Think of waterfall as being similar in concept to the old USSR central planning of the economy. Think of Scrum as similar to a market economy.

— Ken Schwaber

You know that Scrum is gaining traction when all of the things that have been ignored to date become painfully obvious and you just wish you had never started the whole thing. This often happens within three months. At that point, the only thing that pulls me through is looking back and realizing that things have actually improved.

— Ken Schwaber

Ken Schwaber on software quality:

I think what will happen is some places will really get it and will be so competitively compelling that others will have to rapidly change or go out of business. As an offset to that, consider that Ford has known for 40 years how Toyota builds cars.

Beware metrics. We are enamored with them from the days of waterfall, when we couldn’t tell what was going on until the end of the project. So, we devised metrics to attempt to read the tea leaves of what might be going on so we could get early warnings. Earned value is a great example of this. Also, we developed metrics to prove that things were improving to our customers even though over 1/2 of our projects failed. See, we are getting better, so leave us alone and please don’t fire us.

— Ken Schwaber

We are so unprofessional it is incredible. The legacy of waterfall is so dominant it is scary.

— Ken Schwaber