I’ve been a follower of Scrum ever since I first heard Ken Schwaber present the subject at an XP user group meeting in Pasadena in ’04. Scrum has come a long way since then, boasting over 50,000 Certified ScrumMasters worldwide. Scrum is well beyond the innovator and early-adopter stages and firmly entrenched in the early-majority stage. People are no longer asking, “Will Scrum work?” but rather “How will Scrum work for me?”
Unfortunately, along with popularity comes dilution and permutation. Surrounding a core of solid, serious adopters lies a realm of half-serious adopters sometimes jokingly, but affectionately, referred to as “Scrum-buts.” You hear them say things like “We’re doing Scrum, but we’re not doing daily standup meetings,” or “We’re doing Scrum, but we can’t track velocity because the iteration work keeps getting interrupted with support calls.” Scrum purists would say that these people are missing the point of Scrum. That the full measure of benefit from Scrum cannot be realized by adopting it piecemeal.
I used to be that kind of a purist, but I’ve changed. Continue reading Scrumban = Scrum + Kanban →
VersionOne today released the results of their fifth annual “State of Agile Development” survey. For those of us who have been in the trenches, these results are not surprising, but it’s sure nice to see our anecdotal evidence backed up by a survey that sampled over 4,500 respondents.
As you read the survey results, pay special attention to the question, “How Many Teams Adopted Agile?” 29% of those surveyed work for companies with 10 or mores agile teams, with another 17% reporting between 5 and 10 agile teams. That’s huge — and it should put rest any lingering doubts about whether or not Agile has gone mainstream.
You can read the survey results online and/or download them as a PDF here: http://www.versionone.com/state_of_agile_development_survey/10/
Among other points brought up by Barbara Nelson at the OC APLN meeting last week, she contends that Product Owner is the most stressful role in Scrum, and I don’t doubt that. I’m sure it’s especially true in organizations that haven’t yet wizened up to the fact that product marketing takes a triad of full-time roles (a Product Strategist, a Technical Product Manager, and a Product Marketing Manager aka. Go-To-Market Manager). Not only do some organizations try to cram all three roles into a single position, but they often pile on the tasks of a Sales Engineer to boot.
Then, comes along Scrum (or some other form of Agile) and the whole Technical Product Manager role gets turned upside down to become what Scrum calls a Product Owner. About the only good news here is that Mike Cohn shows in his book, Succeeding with Agile, that the time required of a Product Owner while an organization is adopting Agile is not too intense right at the start. New Scrum development teams place much higher demands on the ScrumMaster than the Product Owner at first, before the ratio flip-flops. So, there’s a little leeway for the product management organization to figure out how to accommodate Scrum in their day-to-day activities while the development teams are still getting up to speed on Scrum. That leeway is a small gift that shouldn’t be squandered.
For more about the triad of product marketing roles, be sure to grab Pragmatic Marketing’s free e-book, The Strategic Role of Product Management.
I started playing with pivotaltracker.com today, which is a free, hosted storyboard tool. It’s free, but not open source, so you do not have the option of hosting it yourself, which means you’ll have to trust Pivotal Labs with your data. This includes: trusting that the service will remain up, trusting that the service will remain free, trusting that Pivotal won’t use your data to compete with you, etc. Some of these issues can be mitigated (e.g. by performing frequent exports of your data.)
Trust issues aside, so far, so good. Continue reading pivotaltracker.com, so far, so good →
a blog by Craig L. Jones, Software Agilist
