Congratulations to the seven new Australian Certified ScrumMasters whose hand-eye co-ordination was tested on Thursday!

With our numbers swelled by a few additional participants from the University of Sydney, we had a lot of fun with the twister-style Self-Organisation and Ball Points exercises at the start of Day 2. According to participants, these were valuable as they helped them to experience and understand the though processes involved in Scrum projects.

We played 6 iterations of the Ball Point Game and almost immediately the team fell into a strong rhythm - several balls leaving and arriving in hands in-sync as can be seen in the above photo. It was actually quite mesmerising to watch. The team found that it could readily achieve around 50 ball points per iteration but finding an optimisation sufficient to break through the 60 point barrier was a real challenge.

The group had a lot of questions which invoked some interesting conversations. Scrum's practices of prioritisation, iterative planning and timeboxing proved crucial in getting through the core material and additional topics of most interest by the end of day 2. When under pressure to get lots of things done, use Scrum!

We finished the course with a review of Agile contracting models. For those interested in this topic, the following web resources are worth having a look at.

• Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts
• Agile Contracts: Money for Nothing and Your Change for Free
• Agile & Contracts: Serge Beaumont, Xebia

If you are interested in Agile Contracts AND happen to live in the Sydney area, you may wish to attend the next Sydney Scrum User Group meeting on May 6 for which the topic of the meeting is exactly this.