I’m a big fan of agile and lean development/organizations. I’m all in, completely. For the last 5+ years I’ve been practicing agile development, and now I would consider myself a full on scrum practitioner.
However, there are a few interesting things I’ve noticed over the years:
a) Many people say they are doing Scrum, but they have no clue — Having a daily stand up meeting does not mean you are doing Scrum
b) People either love or hate Scrum, there’s not much in between
c) Some dev shops are using Scrum as an excuse to throw our process and documentation — this is the key message of this post
In my experience, Scrum only works if you go all in. You can’t partially implement Scrum.. As I said earlier, you can’t institute a Daily Scrum and call it a day. Scrum means iterative development, production ready code every sprint, daily stand ups, product backlog, etc. When you fully implement the process, it works! When I was first exposed to agile, I had a hard time getting over the minimal documentation, and the misconception that there was little to no process. It took me a while to realize my first exposure was tainted by working with people who had no clue how agile and scrum actually work.
So, how much process and documentation do you need to effectively implement scrum?? The best answer? Enough! You need a product backlog. User stories work best for this, but use cases are also effective. Now, how about process? The typical agile stuff is very important. Daily scrum meeting, sprint planning, sprint review, product backlog, with a Scrum Master coordinating and removing roadblocks are critical to a successful scrum implementation. But, this doesn’t address the development (coding) specific process. Test driven development (TDD), continuous integration, and build automation are all necessary components as well.
So is this enough? I don’t know. You tell me. Like Curly said in City Slickers. The secret of life is that one thing, and you have to figure out what that one thing is. Yes, there are several key tenets of Scrum that you have to use to be successful, but you have to figure out how much process and documentation is enough, and only do that much, and not any more.
Is this too esoteric? Perhaps, but with the amount of info available on the web with a simple Google search, any competent dev team should be able to put a successful scrum framework in place, and churn out high quality software.
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