ScrumBut: Method Picking

After two conference days I attended several sessions and talked to lots of people. It is amazing how many claim to do Scrum but mention following typical statements:

"How should I change Scrum to fit into my organization?"
"With which part of Scrum should I start?"
"There is no Product Owner in our team, we don't need one."
"We don't do Sprint Planning because we planned all project phases at the beginning and execute that plan in 3 week sprints."
etc.

This is the wrong way! If you pick a few single methods or practices of Scrum the result will not be Scrum.

Or as Jeff Sutherland said: "You may change anything in Scrum but don't call it Scrum!"

One may argue this is just another dogmatic restriction of Scrum. Let's find out why it makes sense to leave Scrum as is.

Think generally about your team's definition of done. Everyone of your team is able to understand what you mean by saying "this story is done." It is just useful to have such a common basis of understanding. Now replace "done" with "scrum" and extrapolate your team to the rest of the world. The definition of Scrum is based on its roles, activities, and artifacts as described in the Scrum Guide or any other serious book on Scrum. Everyone in the world with such knowledge of the Scrum framework will understand what you mean by saying "we're doing Scrum." Take a look:

"done" = done

"Scrum" = Scrum

"not done" = not done

"not Scrum" = not Scrum

"I'm almost finished with this task" simply means "not done".
"We're using only a few things of Scrum" simply means "not Scrum".
It's that easy.

There is no binary black-white scale, of course. In the beginning of your transition to Scrum you will see many things that won't work as scrummy as intended. The important point is not to exclude these things right from the start of your transition. Always start with the full Scrum set even if nothing is working well. Go on, learn, inspect and adapt - with good mentoring and coaching your team will improve soon enough even if you think that is not soon enough.

ScrumBut: The "Agile" Buzzwords

A normal day in the office. I tried to get more details for some stories from a product owner. Half an hour before lunch time a co-worker entered the room, we did some small talk and made an appointment to go for a walk'n'talk later.

Suddenly he wondered about the book on my desk: "Agile Retrospectives" by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen (http://bit.ly/cvoaH). He took a look at the back and read "Project retrospectives help your teams examine what went right--and what went wrong--on a project."

He instantly asked "Why is any new book called 'agile'? There are enough 'agile' books on the market. Is there any need for a book on retrospectives? Doing retrospectives is a common project management method, so what for do we need that 'agile' buzzword for retrospectives?"

In my point of view we need the 'agile' buzzword for everything we do! Why? Simply to intensify our agile project marketing. There are lots of stakeholders who still do not understand what it means being agile. We have to throw all that agile mumbo-jumbo around so that they get the chance to ask what we are talking about.

"We have to get higher quality, faster development, more features realized, so we will use a bunch of agile best practices. But whatever we are going to do, the most important thing is to control everything in a closed-meshed manner. And we need key performance figures."

The biggest ScrumBut in this quote is "use a bunch of agile best practices": do some planning poker here, take the name 'feature' from FDD, talk about Critical Chain project management, and write a 40 pages definition of those 'best practices'. Will such an approach have any chance for success? I doubt it.

Lets take a look at the other points of the quote. You want to control everything? Of course, you can, it's no problem at all: daily scrums, iteration reviews, and product demonstrations will assure controlling. You want figures? Just collect our agile metrics and you have them: velocity, burndowns, number of stories done, and so on. But what is the goal of controlling and collecting figures? We want to improve our team, our methods, our agility. The best way to improve is by implementing retrospectives the agile way (just read the book on my desk if you want to know more http://bit.ly/cvoaH).

Once a manager said: "Could you please stop talking about 'timeboxing'! This concept is so old and it's common sense to keep track of my project at least once a week. I don't want to hear that term 'timeboxing' any longer!"

"Timeboxing is not about frequent progress tracking, it's about fixed lengths of meetings and iterations. You even can timebox our release if we have to be date-driven. If story priorities change at the end of the timebox, some lower valued stories will just be moved into the next release", I replied.

"What do you mean 'moved into the next release'? You gave the promise to implement this set of features for this release at the planned date."

"You know reality. Project scopes change constantly, things may be decided to be more important this month and less important next month. Additional features are moved into a project and some other features get too large to be implemented at the proposed date. If your goal is to release twice a year, we have to timebox our releases to 6 months. This will guarantee a sustainable pace for the releases. If additional requirements get into a release, some other stories have to move to a later release. Otherwise we will not be able to guarantee a new release of the product every 6 months. Even worse: the succeeding release will be delayed before it ever started."

Somehow my last sentences opened his eyes at least a little. But that ScrumBut discussion has not been finished yet. I will report the results of our next discussions, of course.

The team leader of a group of developers once said: "we will not do iterations. That would be too many changes for the team, let's just do this feature driven-development now. If this works, maybe we can do some more."

This one is a heavy ScrumBut: do half of some agile method. Without iterations every other advantage of being agile gets lost completely. You would win nothing if you had to take a look at the project's results half a year later for the first time. Iterative planning and iterative retrospectives are so important that they must not be skipped by any means!


If you want to know more about ScrumButs, take a look at Ken Schwaber's site http://www.controlchaos.com/. Some interesting thoughts about ScrumButs can be found in http://www.noop.nl/2009/09/scrumbuts-are-the-best-part-of-scrum.html.