How (not) to start using Scrum?

Scrum is an agile framework and out of all agile frameworks (XP, Kanban are other popular frameworks), it is the most common agile framework practised by companies around the world.

There are businesses and software teams that are adopting agile after thoroughly understanding the theory, values and benefits that agile framework like scrum brings.

But there are businesses and teams too where scrum is practised just because it is a trend in the software industry. Or because other competitors have adopted it so they have to adapt it too. Eventually, in a rush to adapt scrum, companies start to pick and choose what suits them ignoring the minimal requirements of practising scrum. For e.g.one of the thing often people say is they are using agile by having sprints and a daily stand-up. This is certainly not scrum!

Scrum’s roles, artifacts, events, and rules are immutable and although implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum. Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices.

Instead of the top management changing their and the development organisation mind set first, they adopt scrum by just looking at major agile/scrum benefits like satisfied customers, reduction in production costs and having more productive teams.mind set first, they adopt scrum by just looking at major agile/scrum benefits like satisfied customers, reduction in production costs and having more productive teams.

Many development team wonders why they have to attend unnecessary meetings like the ones mentioned below:

• Sprint planning
• Daily scrum
• Sprint review
• Spring Retrospective

While development team is not fully clear as to why they are using scrum, managers continues to control the teams by getting them to follow the plan. In other words, the work is required to be done based on single person 's experience,insight and intelligence. This usually results in less motivated and less committed teams. Rather than facilitating the teams and removing obstacles and empowering the teams, managers try to control team by making decisions that should be otherwise done by the team. This usually happens because managers still doesn't have agile mindset, as they are used to the traditional waterfall process.

To transform mindset into an agile one, the teams and organisations need to first understand the theory on which scrum is based.It's adaptation largely depends on the leadership in the organization and how they lead everyone.

Scrum Theory

To understand why we do what we do in Scrum, we must undertsand the theory on which it is founded.

Scrum is founded on empirical process control theory, or empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk.

The empirical process control theory is based on three pillars: Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation. To get benefit out of scrum, teams have to make sure it is being practiced based on these pillars.

The three pillars

Each scrum event use these pillars to learn from experience and to make decisions based on what is known at that time. This helps in learning from the past or what is known and make decisions for the future work based on learning, The three pillars gives opportunity to improve the process as well as the software being developed.

Transparency of the artifacts like product backlog, sprint backlog and burnt down charts enables the team and other stakeholders to view where the organisation is with respect to the software being developed. This enables them to inspect and adapt based on transparent artifacts.

Development team meets everyday in daily standup to inspect how they are doing in the sprint. Based on the progress they can adapt themselves so that sprint goal is met.

Sprint review and the product demo in it gives scrum team and other stakeholders an opportunity to review (inspection) how the product has evolved after the functionality added in the latest sprint and what can they do in the next sprint to (adaptation) further increment the product based on business value. The product backlog helps in selecting (transparency) the features required to be picked up for the next sprint.

Sprint retrospectives gives the team opportunity to inspect the process and look for improvements that can be adapt in the future sprints.

Similarly,sprint planning enables the scrum team to inspect work from the product backlog so that the team can pick up items from the backlog. Past sprints helps the team to understand how much work they have done (inspect) and what can be done in the next based on the velocity of the team. This enables the team to adapt themselves each sprint. Again transparency of artifacts is required to make an accurate decision.

Conclusion

In short, to practise scrum effectively and with purpose, the mind set from top to bottom in the organisation is required to be changed. The buy-in from the top leadership is needed in this regard. To change the mindset of people from top to bottom they need to understand the basics of scrum first i.e the empiricism and its pillars.

References: The two quotes mentioned in the post above are taken from official scrum guide.