In the same sense that it takes the proverbial village to raise a child, it takes a community to capture the patterns of a powerful discipline like Scrum. The authors have drawn insights from the thousands and thousands of Scrum practitioners worldwide with whom we have worked for many years. These are the folks on the front line, in the trenches, whose work bears out what works well and what doesn’t work well in complex system development. We first and foremost acknowledge them—or perhaps we should say “you”—as those of our community who have contributed both directly and indirectly to the hard-won insights here. Thanks to all of you out there.
We also thank the Hillside Group, our umbrella “chartering” organization for sending its representatives to give us an outside perspective on how we were doing things, in spite of the fact that we kidnapped just about everyone they sent.
We very much appreciate those of the group who, with their selfless and often anonymous gifts, made it possible for many of the rest of the team to attend the annual event. You know who you are.
A special thanks to our co-author Jens Østergaard, the Lord of Stora Nyteboda, to the management and staff of Helenekilde Badhotel in Tisvildeleje, Denmark (2011–2014), of the Odawara Resort in Odawara, Japan (October 2015), and of Quinta da Pacheca in Régua, Portugal (2015–2019), all of whom warmly hosted us for our annual events and intensive editorial sessions. They were each homes away from home for our gatherings. And thanks to all who helped out at these venues: Sandra Dias and her team, as well as Christine Hegarty, Espen Suenson, and Mette Jaquet. In the same vein, we'd like to thank Neil Harrison, Jim Coplien, Cesário Ramos and, again, Jens Østergaard, who opened their homes to us for intensive editorial sessions. And we appreciate Kiro Harada, who arranged the session in Odawara, and Ademar Aguiar, who arranged the events at Pacheca.
A very special thanks to our manuscript reviewers outside the Scrum Patterns Group, who patiently scoured the volume of material to give us feedback. We want to give a special mention to Mark Gillett, whose comments added a dimension of experience that complemented ours very well, and whose excruciatingly thorough review, detailed comments, and concrete suggestions almost give him the stature of an honorary co-author. Other relentless and thorough reviewers included Steve Berczuk, Paul Mock, Adam Tornhill, Dary Merckens, Joe Fair, Michael Keeling, Yvette Backer, John Pagonis, Marcelo R. Lopez, Jr., Jamie Collins, Portia Tung and Boško Majdanac, who spent countless hours poring over the manuscript to point out mistakes and opportunities for improvement. There were also great comments from Martin de Liefde, Chris Johnson, Al J. Simons, Jowen Mei, Peter Gfader, Kenny Munck, Nis Holst, Michiel Sival, Marko Leppänen, Johannes Koskinen, Jari Rauhamäki, Philipp Bachmann, and Rune Funch Søltoft. Many thanks, folks!
Many warm thanks to the Pragmatic Bookshelf editor who got us started, Brian MacDonald. But our warmest thanks goes to Adaobi Obi Tulton who worked patiently and tirelessly with us—especially with the editorial team of Jim Coplien, Cesário Ramos, Mark den Hollander and Lachlan Heasman—to bring the book through its final year of ascent to realization. It was a real pleasure to work with you, Adaobi!
The authors would like to warmly thank Joe Bergin for his own pattern which was the inspiration for our own pattern of the same name, High Value First.
Many thanks to John Hayes for relating the experience of his Scrum Team as they tracked happiness and velocity, and for sharing the data we used for the graphs in Happiness Metric.
At Scrum PLoP 2015 Richard Gabriel was our guest, and led us in a workshop on effective writing. Thanks for caring and sharing, Dick.
Tsutomo Yasui and Yasunobu Kawaguchi contributed at the Sashimi Scrum Blitz in Odawara, Japan in October 2015.
Thanks to the people at autotracer.org and at inkscape.org for some raster-to-vector image conversions.
A great thanks to Nofoprint in Helsingør, Denmark, and to Søren Mikkelsen, for their support and responsiveness in producing the alpha versions of the book manuscript—great quality work, folks!
And, last, thanks to the many who helped review and refine the book through their presence at our Writers’ Workshops and through correspondence, including Dan Greening, Doug Shimp, Paul DuPuy, Martien van Steenbergen, and Adrian Lander.