If you’re just starting with Scrum, these are the top mistakes you will make

Changing practices overnight is hard. Heck, it’s hard to even drink a different flavoured coffee in the morning, let alone settle on a different way of working! Still, the very act of deciding to change practices is a huge and brave step for any company, mostly because it increases uncertainty and can have a serious impact on delivery deadlines. In any case though, deciding to take that step nevertheless, deserves a big round of applause. You will make mistakes, and as long as you accept that this is a life fact, you’re good. Identify those mistakes, work on them, and always keep an eye for improvement. Here’s a list of things that are likely to go sideways so that you can start forming your mitigation strategy sooner rather than later.

1. You won’t be doing Scrum

Doing proper Scrum starting one fine day without prior knowledge or support, never happened. Sorry, you will be doing waterfall but you will name it Scrum. It’s really hard to change practices and mindset overnight.

2. You won’t have real user stories

Most of your “user stories” will be tasks or technical tasks that would essentially be the system specs written in smaller chunks.

3. You will experience scope creep

Since you will transition from classic requirements into another field, the whole process of estimation and effort will change.

4. You will keep dragging your user stories over to future sprints

You won’t be able to explain what a user story is about, when it is complete, you will still be counting on “resources”.

5. Testing won’t be part of your Sprint

Testing is something that is done towards the end of development in a traditional waterfall approach. In Agile methodologies, it’s part of the development cycle (or Sprint). That can feel uncomfortable and difficult to grasp.

6. You may not have a dedicated Scrum Master

You will believe that Scrum is all about a morning meeting and a planning session. Why the heck would you need a Scrum Master for? You have a Project Manager for that work.

7. You may not have a dedicated Product Owner

You have Product Managers, which is essentially the same, isn’t it? (No.)

8. You will not be doing retrospectives

What’s the point of that? Nobody wants to waste their time and go to yet another meeting!

9. You will not be able to demo done work, and when it is done, it will be so technical that people wouldn’t understand it even if you did demo it

So eventually you will stop doing demos altogether since nobody attends, and even if they did, it would be very hard for them to follow what you’re doing. Let alone half of the time VC doesn’t work or the environment is down.

10. You won’t have a Definition of Done or a Definition or Ready

Since you’ll be working on Requirements, you’ll take work as is, in small chunks, and develop it. That’s all that there will be: a big pile of requirements broken into bits. It will be done when testers sign it off based on their suite of tests. Bugs will be caught in the Live environment.

11. Your morning Scrum meetings will likely drag for half an hour or more if they happen at all daily. They will feel more like an interrogation rather than a morning Scrum.

Some people will get bored and opt-out of the morning Scrum meetings. If you do manage to get everyone together, everyone will want to expand in detail what they’ve done, and won’t be long before ping pong discussions will emerge.

12. The team will be either too big or too small

The people in the team will be so tightly dependent on each other’s work that you are likely to end up with a team of many people, and that’s not including the testers!

13. You won’t be able to explain user story points to the Project Manager

When you start with user story size estimation, your Project Manager will ask you to convert those to days, so that she’ll be able to explain it to her stakeholders.

14. Story points will equal days

Since point 13, you will end up tying story points to days of work to avoid the hustle.

15. You will have a Project Manager

This will be another project, just in Agile. So the Project Manager will still be needed to coordinate the various parts of development.

16. Nobody will be able to tell what exactly you do

No change in visibility is likely to occur; as such, people around you will believe you are “doing Agile now” but won’t be able to really tell the difference or know what you’re on to exactly.

17. You will believe “you’re Agile now”

Just doing a morning meeting, a planning session and using small chunks of work ≠ Agile.

18. You won’t release after Sprint end

Even teams who are doing proper Scrum for years haven’t nailed that. Release is something that typically happens by the Operations guys, with gradual code promotion to different environments and after several approvals. This will continue to be the case as your environments will mostly be out of sync and unreliable.

Now that you’ve read the top mistakes that you will encounter when starting with Scrum, you can go ahead and search what you can do to try to avoid them!