Scrum: To go or not to go?
Scrum: To go or not to go? That wont' be a question.
“All roads lead to Rome.”
“Little by little and bit by bit.”
“Adopt, adapt, and improve.”
First thing first! Agile and Waterfall are both methodologies to help development team produce high-quality software. Kanban and Scrum are commonly used Agile practices, and, according to a questionnaire, Scrum is by far the most popular Agile methodology, with 80% of the survey respondents stating that they use the approach within their Agile transformations.
Those who start their project or program management career as Scrum masters (SM) clearly find Scrum/Agile as PM-friendly practices; yet, it does not say Scrum masters require no technical skills or least domain expertise. Instead, the key and sole responsibility is team facilitation, which spans from identifying and thus removing impediments during development cycles (sprints), encouraging team’s technical professionalism, process and performance coaching to serving as cross-organization mindset nurture and catalyst. SMs won’t be a fit without being able to understand how the final product deliverable would be like or savvy the context within which the engineering team are practicing.
If you are a Waterfall-methodology veteran, well, don’t just cut and run! You may benefit from the Scrum practice thanks to:
- Each increment is useable and shippable; if not, it insinuates something not quite right with resource or task planning
- Daily SU MTGs, likely, reinforce programmers’ commitment to “get the job done”
- Each backlog item (to develop) is valued, estimated, and testable so you can always expect a comprehensive function and present it to project stakeholders, rather than halfway done of many items with nothing to demo
- Transparency and information alignment is not encouraged, but a MUST; frequent inspections and constant adaptions, in order to improve, eschew passive interventions, which are usually required and painstaking with high risk and costly projects
- Embrace changes and expect new task items emerge, considering change management is the daily norm
And yeah! I heard you. Easier said than done especially when the companies killing it are Netflix, Spotify, Apple, and Google, and they are all large-scale brand companies marketing their own products. This gets to the last, but not the least, gist today: any foreseeable challenge?
It denotes culture, organization transformation and takes everyone to pitch in. Full-stack engineers is a case in point. For typical Scrum practices, an engineer is expected to sign up for work, deliver useable and shippable spring backlog items, and proves end-to-end coverage. [翻譯成白話文:一位開發工程師必須自己能夠獨立作業、完成交付功能的前端、後端與介接] Developers, themselves, need to figure out business requirements with product owners with SM’s help; developers and SM works as a team, tackling technical issues. No more system analysts or system designers to walk you through.
Don’t take it a huge endeavor; instead, we are all committed produce high-quality software. Adopt, adapt, and improve.
Reference: