When we adopt a methodology, is it reasonable to ‘pick and mix’ the major elements of the technique? A large UK corporation claims it has adopted SCRUM but, when pushed, agrees that it has adopted parts of the methodology, rather than the complete approach.
The software development had been off-shored to India; the Product Owner is in the UK. This means the SCRUM meetings had to be substituted with conference calls, severly cutting down on personal interaction and threatening the integrity of the SCRUM meeting. I have found that virtual teams can work provided there is a sensible mix of telephone conference calls and physical meetings. Doing strategy development, I found monthly physical meetings and weekly conference calls worked very well. For SCRUM based development, I feel that the Sprint reviews need to be face to face to achieve the goals of the meetings.
A core principle of SCRUM is to deliver incrementally, slices of usable functionality; ideally the first Sprint should deliver this first slice. Our large corporation had dropped this basic element. Does it matter?
My experience of reviewing runaway projects is that most failing projects fail because of non-functional performance, rather than lack of user functionality. Arguably, we can add more programmers to a project to add more functionality. However, fixing failed non-functional performance is far from trivial.
Creating a slice of (end-to-end) functionality using SCRUM drives the development team to address the non-functional issues very early. One project I reviewed was three years into a two year programme; the functional specification was agreed but the non-functional requirements were yet to be agreed – it got cancelled.
The end-to-end slice explores many of the grey areas. The early stages of a programme should be clarifying these poorly understood areas.
My conclusion is that dropping a key element of a methodology destroys the integrity of that methodology, putting at risk any ability to enjoy those benefits intended by that technique.
Ian Richmond
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