Well, it was quite a Scrum class we had last week. Twenty-three people in all plus two trainers! Although we didn't get a full class photo, the following shows how a team of 8 self-organised to rapidly solve a "knotty problem" as part of one of the group exercises.

We did a series of user story writing, estimating and prioritisation exercises based on a fictional website that each of the teams invented. What came out of that were some very creative (and one somewhat perverse) concepts and prioritised features. Within about 30 mins we had a product vision, user stories, estimates and a prioritised Product Backlog ready to go. If only we had had a real VC in the room to pitch them to...!

The five team presentations on Scrum at the end of the course were all fantastic. One of the teams managed to give a summary of just about all of the key points on Scrum that we had studied over the two days whilst another gave a classically structured and highly audience-targeted presentation exposition on the change process involved.

A big thank you goes out to Lachlan Heasman of ThoughtWorks who took leave from his day job to step-in and co-train at short notice. We all benefited from discussion of some of Lachlan's experiences with Scrum and my feet and voicebox are particularly grateful for his efforts!

Another big thank you goes to the University of Sydney who hosted the course. The training room was suitably large and we had excellent catering including a fantastic Thai meal in Newtown on both days.

Congratulations and all the best with Scrum guys!