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Getting „more“ agile

by Matthias Schmid

I am passionate about lean agile development processes, because I saw several failed projects in the past doing scrum.

Scrum gone wrong

A few examples about Scrum gone wrong:

  • Miss the sprint goal every time: Inflation of story point values
  • Translate story points into time: developers doing the work of the project manager
  • Translate story points into money: developers doing the work of the purchase department
  • Scaled agile framework (SAFe): justification that the business does not need to change anything

A leaner approach

Thankfully you can be agile (=flexible) without scrum, for example by doing Extreme Programming.

Inspired by Allen Holub, I'd like to discuss a much more lean process that does not even need estimates: #NoEstimates

Feedback from the session

Feedback from the session was that indeed some companies do scrum successfully and are happy with it. Scrum and even more #NoEstimates only work when the whole company is agile, especially startups.

What is a story point?

A story point should resemble complexity, not a time or money equivalent.

How to meet a deadline?

  • Split larger stories into smaller stories
  • Do the most important story first
  • Reduce scope
  • Lesser important stories won’t make it into the product

Points that help to make scrum work

  • You must not live scrum by the book, you can customize
  • Sprints help some teams to get accountability of the team
  • Sprints help some teams to split stories to fit into 2-week sprints.
  • Story points should not be visible to the customer
  • You can get a better understanding of a story with Planning poker
  • Estimating and splitting stories helps to gain understanding
  • For larger projects, do a sprint commitment for each subteam, not just an overall commitment
  • Teams shall not exceed ~8 people, 20 people are too much!
  • Scrum with a sprint length of one day comes close to Extreme Programming.
  • Some developers feel motivated by meeting the sprint commitment
  • Sprint velocity can be used for salary negotiation / forecasting
  • Switch to kanban if appropriate

Summary

To be honest, I was surprised, that scrum works for some companies, because I had several bad experiences with it. I was about that XP without estimates is a genius idea, however it may seem like a radical approach.