June 18, 2009

Slides from the June 18 meeting

Ken Schwaber

Scrum has been a very widely adopted Agile process, used for managing such complex work as systems development and development of product releases. When waterfall is no longer in place, however, a lot of long standing habits and dysfunctions have come to light. This is particularly true with Scrum, because transparency is emphasized in Scrum projects.

We had a terrific showing with over 100 attendees!

Some of the dysfunctions include poor quality product and completely inadequate development practices and infrastructure. These arose because the effects of them couldn't be seen very clearly in a waterfall project. In a Scrum project, the impact of poor quality caused by inadequate practices and tooling are seen in every sprint.

The primary habits that hinder us are flaccid developers and flaccid customers who believe in magic, as in:

• Unskilled developers - most developers working in a team are unable to build an increment of product within an iteration. They are unfamiliar with modern engineering and quality practices, and they don't have an infrastructure supportive of these practices.
• Ignorant customer - most customers are still used to throwing a book of requirements over the wall to development and waiting for the slips to start occurring, all the time adding the inevitable and unavoidable changes.
• Belief in magic - most customers and managers still believe that if they want something badly enough and pressure developers enough to do it, that it will happen. They don't understand that the pressure valve is quality and long term product sustainability and viability.

Have you seen these problems? Is your company "tailoring" Scrum to death?

Ken described how Scrum addresses these problems and gave us a preview of plans for the future of the Scrum certification efforts.