Scrum and XP from the Trenches – 2nd edition

Remote windows – big screens at each location, showing a permanent view of the other locations, sort of like a virtual window between two departments. You can stand there and wave. You can see who is at his desk and who is talking to whom

Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong!

Good: If we could redo the same sprint again, we would do these things the same way.
Could have done better: If we could redo the same sprint again, we would do these things differently.
Improvements: Concrete ideas about how we could improve in the future.

“refactor” (= improve code readability and remove duplication).

Focus factor is an estimate of how focused the team is. A low focus factor may mean that the team expects to have many disturbances or expects their own time estimates to be optimistic.

if you can take the optimal number of people for this story (not too few and not too many, typically two), and lock yourselves into a room with lots of food and work completely undisturbed, after how many days will you come out with a finished, demonstrable, tested, releasable implementation?” If the answer is “three guys locked into a room it will take approximately four days” then the initial estimate is 12 story points.

Most Scrum teams I meet (almost all, in fact) end up doing two-week or three-week sprints.

strongly recommend separating backlog refinement (estimation, story splitting, etc.) into a separate meeting so that sprint planning can be more focused. Product owner participation is still crucial though, in both meetings.

Estimates are in story points or T-shirt sizes (S/M/L), or there are even no estimates at all. But more on that later.

http://www.scrumguides.org