SCRUM – the start or the finish

Recently there has been something of a backlash against SCRUM. There are two obvious camps (maybe you can think of others) of people who have knocked SCRUM recently.

The ‘agile is pants’ camp who see it as a fad and the lean camp who see SCRUM as a special case that is easily superseded by lean practices.

By contrast I find SCRUM useful in my day job of coaching teams to assist them in delivering code more effectively. In my opinion SCRUM has three benefits; it places quality at the core through doneness and ensures two way communication between organisation and team through demo and retrospective, it compels the team to take responsibility for process improvement.

If you have these elements in place then maybe you won’t benefit so much from SCRUM. However, if you don’t then adopting SCRUM can be like turning on a light. The team is given respect and space to make it’s own delivery commitments, in return the business can expect a degree of professionalism and should have this demonstrated to them in terms of what constitutes doneness for this iteration. The team are invited to reflect on both progress and impediments at the end of a short iteration, likely outputs are the identification of organisational or team factors that are constraining the team. As such the team should, if supported, speed up over time.

So for the mature effective development team in a supportive organisation maybe it’s not necessary. I also firmly believe that Lean principles have something to offer to software development. However, when presented with an under-performing team or organisational issues I would recommend SCRUM as a framework that will make space to improve.