In a slightly provocatively titled “Why I’m done with Scrum” blog post, Jimmy Bogard provides four reasons reasons why he decided to abandon using Scrum to adopt a lean approach to software development.In his first two reasons, he discusses the inefficiencies of the iteration system.
This article from Rob Maher focuses on how to increase productivity. It discusses how changing a project staffing model could increase the productivity of project teams (PDF document). There is published evidence that short-lived groups of people brought together for a project are correlated with lower productivity. His view is that in an agile world, teams are permanent and the organization optimizes at the team level. Permanent teams enable consistent estimation, which is not possible using the matrix approach.
Scrum teams usually develop iteratively new product features. In larger project, teams can also be organized around layers or components of the product. In this article, Mukesh Chaudhary discusses how to manage the complexity with Scrum component teams and integration of their deliverables to make up a feature.
In his article “Creating an ATDD Ready Sprint Backlog in Scrum“, Ralph Jocham discusses the requirements definition in Scrum and how examples allows the team to better understand them. As the backlog is now also expressed in terms of business requirements, each team member can easily focus on the bigger picture during the Scrum stand-up meeting and align with the ‘why’. If you translate the business-facing examples into automated tests, it enables the team to verify during the Sprint that the software increment always meets the evolving requirements towards the Definition of Done and the overall goal.
It would be so easy if everyone at our companies just used Scrum or at least Agile. No one would lean on the team for dates and deadlines, and everyone would know that change is a good thing. It’d be one great big happy project management family. But let’s face it: an all-Agile organization isn’t always possible.
This article by Badri Srinivasan discusses the important notion of team leadership in Scrum and how the ScrumMaster should be a Servant Leader for the Scrum team. The article presents the principles of Servant Leadership. This is a philosophy and practice of leadership that is defined as “a management philosophy which implies a holistic view of the quality of people, work and community spirit. A servant leader is someone who is servant first and who contributes to the well-being of people and community.”
If Scrum provides the project management framework used in a majority of Agile projects, eXtreme Programming (XP) is the main source of technical practices for Agile software development. This book written by Alan Shalloway, Scott Bain, Ken Pugh and Amir Kolsky is focused on these technical aspects. The first part deal with the coding and testing activities, and the second part discusses how to handle the software design activity with an Agile perspective.
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