Comments on: Agile is not Scrum

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:57:57 +0000

It might have been interesting if you’d enquired further, to see how many of those 145 people were *really* following Scrum, as opposed to doing something they called Scrum. It’s my feeling the term, like agile, is greatly misused by those who have adopted ideas they’ve heard about, often missing the point of why those ideas should be practiced…

By: The Software Purist

The Software Purist — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:17:13 +0000

Hi David. I came across your post and I like it. I think that this is a common mistake that they become synonymous, even though they obviously are not. It’s a shame that this is so widespread, because it causes some dangerous confusion.

On another note, I wrote a blog post on the topic of Scrum as well, which you can find at this link, if you’re interested: http://www.softwarepurist.com/blog/index.php/scrum-agility-and-practical/

By: Scrum: Agility and Practality? - The Software Purist

Scrum: Agility and Practality? - The Software Purist — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:37:55 +0000

[...] The first thing to note when discussing this project is that I have worked on other Agile projects before. Generally speaking, however, prior to this one, saying we were doing Agile was more of a catch phrase and Agile wasn’t really being done. Having been trained in Agile and having done my research, in these cases, I was well aware that we weren’t doing Agile, but I believe I was in the minority. Anyway, coming back from that tangent, in this most recent project, the group did make an effort to follow Agile, as it was being dictated by a particular customer. More specifically, we were using Scrum, although most of the way through the process, most of the group was unaware that Agile and Scrum aren’t simply synonyms. An interesting blog article discussing this common problem can be found here. [...]

By: Agile is Not Scrum, Part 2 | Scrum Head

Agile is Not Scrum, Part 2 | Scrum Head — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:33:40 +0000

[...] while back I wrote a post entitled Agile is Not Scrum. Machiel Groenveld commented on that post: There is quite a bit of frustration in this post. You [...]

By: Elegant Code » Agile is Not Scrum, Part 2

Elegant Code » Agile is Not Scrum, Part 2 — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:13:12 +0000

[...] while back I wrote a post entitled Agile is Not Scrum. Machiel Groenveld commented on that post: There is quite a bit of frustration in this post. You [...]

By: John Sonmez

John Sonmez — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:18:37 +0000

You are exactly right. It is very hard to cut through the marketing “fluff” of scrum. Don’t get me wrong, scrum can be great, but it is not agile and it is not the “end all be all” that many consultants would like to pitch it as. One of the major problems I see with people not understanding the difference between agile and scrum, is that they think by doing scrum they will automatically get the benefits of agile, which leaves them with the single biggest problem, IMO, that scrum teams face.

How do we get shippable code in 2 weeks?

Well if you don’t focus on things like, software craftsmanship, best practices, TDD, continuous integration, (many of the XP programming type of methodologies) for actually building your code, you won’t be able to incrementally build shippable code.

By: Machiel Groeneveld

Machiel Groeneveld — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:39:41 +0000

There is quite a bit of frustration in this post. You say you’re not bashing Scrum, but you are bashing something, I can’t make out what exactly though.

Are you saying people should try to do more/better/canonical Scrum? On the other hand, you mention using Kanban/Lean as a toolkit, so should people improve their process based on stuff from the whole Agile knowledge base and not meekly adopt Scrum?

By: Steve Py

Steve Py — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:42:37 +0000

Scrumbuts can be pretty annoying environments. My agile experience started with XP where we chose to try it “by-the-book” for about 2 months, then modified it. The only change we felt was necessary was to use pair-programming when new team members were brought in. After, we used a form of pair-analysis where teams of 2 would be assigned stories, break them down and discuss them together, implement them separately, then swap to do reviews. It wasn’t that PP didn’t work, 2 people can write better code, even a little bit faster than 1 person, but we found by pairing the important part (analysis) and keeping the fundamentals of TDD, CI, and continuous improvement vis standups and the coach, we could squeeze a bit extra out of it. This also avoided it “appearing” to management that it was twice as expensive where with PP, 2 people would be doing the job as one.

The scrumbuts unfortunately just seem like a mess. maybe it’s because I was involved in the XP-but from the beginning, where I’ve been brought into existing scrumbuts. The silliest instance is where a team says it’s scrumming because they do a stand-up meeting in the morning. Not even two week iterations. :/

By: David Starr

David Starr — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:12:01 +0000

I don’t disagree with what you have all said here. The thing is, many teams are failing with ScrumBut. I think Scrum is great when actually practiced well. I also think it is only a gateway drug to actually making your organization perfrom well.

@Robert, see this:

http://elegantcode.com/2009/02/21/how-scrum-is-like-marijuana/

@Jason, why is it bad? Simple. Lack of diversity tends to be harmful to the body of practice in the industry and the fact that Scrum is NOT the silver bullet people treat it as.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:58:56 +0000

So what’s wrong with 145 of 150 saying they’re doing Scrum? Scrum is simple. It’s a great starting point and even if it’s technically ‘scrumbut’ in some scenarios, if those organizations are delivering value, does it really matter what they are or say they are using?