Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Do we blame SCRUM for that too :).?


Scrum Is a project Management Framework. That’s why it doesn’t talk about any technical disciplines or engineering principles. Look at other widely used methodologies for project management such as PMBOK, PRINCE2 or even KANBAN; they don’t talk about any engineering principles either,
But Ive not heard anyone blaming PMBOK because it doesn’t talk about technical practice in software. May be its so clear that PMBOK is meant to use for project management across industries.
But how about scrum then?. I think compared to PMBOK and some other PM methodologies; SCRUM is very less prescriptive and highly adaptive. Due to this simplicity there were so much of confusion in the industry from day one about SCRUM especially from the people who misunderstood RUP as a Project Management process and people who used XP over time with its own technical guidelines.
Just like PMBOK doesn’t tell you not to do automate testing or not to do Pair programming, or domain model design, SCRUM doesn’t stop you doing any of these things. Especially if you are in iterative shippable product increments, using automated testing makes the whole testing tasks more effective.
So it’s quite clear that you need to adapt to your engineering best practices when you use scrum just like when you use PMBOK. But the difference here is that if your engineering principles which you try to adopt to, kill the agile values, you will be having a label of SCRUM but you will never get the real value of SCRUM.
So its important to adopt with simply, “doing everything every time” by revisiting your high level design diagrams etc at every sprint planning. Especially when it comes to larger number of small teams working on same product, you really need to get your act together on how you adopt with proper engineering principles and ownership of them but still doing it “Agile”.
Another mostly misunderstood area is documentation. It’s because Scrum says to be focused on software delivery. If we develop software, our delivery is software, not any other artifacts. Those artifacts should help building software but not a focused delivery under normal circumstances.
But if you have read Mike Cohn’s user stories applied book (really good book), you can find the answer to your problem. If the CEO thinks you need to provide such documentation to protect your IP value of the product, then you can add the main user as the CEO and write the complete user story on what sort of documentation he wants and what is the expectation out of it . so you have tasks in your sprint related to the documentation user story.. Its all about doing what is wanted and not wasting..
The bottom line is that no method is god given or no method is evil. So its all about using your experience and common sence to make something which works in your context.

1 comments:

Unknown on 5:56 AM said...

I don't rely on blames! It was time when one dint work for but one can also take no time to reverse the process and I have experienced that charm of light in scrum. It possess all in it. Good luck!
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