Thursday, June 20, 2013

SCRUM Fails!


For me Standup is an impidement? What about you?

Couple of years back few of my friends ( Naresh and Sandeep) from Agile community did a very different presentation in one of the Agile community meet ups on “Agile WTF (Way To Fail)”. I am trying to bring  clues from that talk to discuss  in  our context.  With few interaction with folks who do Agile here, I find various "agile" practices and which have become the dogma and ceremony that has crept in.

Agile is round the corner for more than a decade, Well, we need to  question if the practices defined a decade ago are still applicable? If yes, have they evolved since? What are some of the original creators of these processes practicing today? 

I randomly asked few, why are we doing ‘Daily Standup’ ? Answer : ‘SCRUM’ says..  without having a rational and value why are we doing standup? Because other teams are doing?  KenShwaber told to daily standup  when there was

a)      no integrated web based ALM with full visibility, traceability and transparency,

b)      there was very limited ability to do continuous delivery and frequent integration

c)       Social engineering  and mobility was at a  very primitive state then

 

Today we have team members who make 50 tweets and at least 100 FB updates every day, starting from boarding the bus to…..  .

If there is a social contract among  the team,  to the context of project there could be un conditional number of updates and tweets. With great collaboration eco systems around, what is the relevance of daily stand up. I understand a context, where team is distributed, need to have a sync.   What is the purpose of stand up? To know what I am working on, where could be the dependence, what support I need, what I am stuck on, what I have planned. If you need a support or help or letting others   know that  you are breaking the code , why should you wait till  the Standup meeting to tell that?

So, in todays connected world, if we create a social eco system including clients and other stakeholders and empower team  to be natural as real  social animal,  Standup is an Impediment

Team can form a unstructured data repository, learning can be in the context. So tell me one reason and a rational that I should ask the team to do ‘Standup’ ?

 

I am ready to take all beatings, but you should convince me..