I had a very interesting conversation on the scrumdevelopment yahoo group this week that really got me thinking about a few things.  The argument was about the value of estimating stories in scrum.  I will definitely talk about that in another post, as Ron Jeffries has once again opened my eyes to a new way of looking at things.  What I really got out of this was a reminder that we need to sometimes go back to the beginning and cut out some of the cruft that has been growing

Ever since I got involved in the agile development community, I’ve struggled with the concept of self organizing teams. We all know that the most highly performing teams are self organizing. The question remains, “How do I, as the duly appointed leader of this team, enable self organization?” This seems like a false proposition, even from the outset. We started with a team that has been formed by some act of management. Then management assigns someone the job of leading t