Scrum: the good, the bad and the ugly

Experiences, reflections and future directions, regarding Scrum application in practice

Rini van Solingen

professor in global software engineering - D.M.vanSolingen@tudelft.nl

CTO at Prowareness We-On - R.vanSolingen@prowareness.nl

Which ‘hat’ today??

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Professor or Consultant?Giraffe-view: Head in the clouds,but feet on the ground (in the dirt)

My 4 books on Scrum (and Agile)

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1. The Power of Scrum – Jeff Sutherland, Rini van Solingen & Eelco Rustenburg2. Scrum for Managers – Rini van Solingen & Rob van Lanen3. How to lead self-managing teams? – Rini van Solingen4. The Responsive Enterprise – Rini van Solingen & Vikram Kapoor

1. 2. 3. 4.

The Good

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Scrum – the good

1. Focus on value and results

• Finishing stuff early and often drives results, gives early feedback, prevents rework and waste

• If things are unfinished, you are not flexible. Scrum brings agility through constant focus on finished results: DONE increments

2. Rhythm through Sprints

• Time-boxed short Sprints create agility, bring freedom, simplicity and predictability

• Sprints change to focus on work instead of moving people around

3. Self-cleaning effects

• Short iterations with sprint reviews and retrospectives fix things

• Self-managing and self-organizing teams focus on improvement

Traditional (u-boat) vs Empirical (dolphin)

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CU-Later versus CU-Soon

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The Bad

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Scrum – the bad

1. Need for super PO’s

• Product-owner is unfairly positioned as solution for decision making

• Great product-ownership seems impossible for a single person

2. Dysfunction of teams

• Building great, skilled, competent, stable teams is really complicated

• Not every employee becomes happy in a team

• Attrition is an exponential enemy of stable teams, but is neglected

3. Seems so simple

• Unfair expectations regarding ease of use and simplicity

• Scrum is extremely hard to master – requires a 180 degrees switch

• Scrum demands rigorous changes in governance and culture to let it really prosper -> Doing Scrum does not make you Agile

Agile with attrition is risky

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Source: Smite, Darja; Van Solingen, Rini. What's the True Hourly Cost of Offshoring? IEEE Software, 2016, 33.5: 60-70.

The Ugly

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Scrum – the ugly

1. Abuse is too easy

• Short-term focus with quick wins now and technical debt later

• Pushing work to teams by product-owners from Sprint to Sprint: pressure cooker burn-out

• Risk for waterfall in disguise with ready-teams, detailed product backlogs and market delivery at the end

2. Deadlock between teams

• Hard to scale - independent end-to-end teams often unfeasible

• Stalls with strong dependencies between teams, but is hard to avoid

3. Hype

• Scrum is used as silver-bullet for everything (stickies and stand-ups)

• Big chances for over-processing and meeting-explosion

Yes, but after all these problems….

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Scrum is being rolled out everywhere

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Scrum - Greatness

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1. Jump start for fast results that focus on value, customer and user

• Scrum helps to jump start delivery when the concept, culture and cadence are part of everyone’s standard way of working

• There is no alternative for speed and agility than customer focused short-cyclic teams

It is just a matter of time until Scrum is part of everyone’s DNA

Building great teams in split seconds?

Thank you very much!

Rini van Solingen is consultant and coach in Scrum, Agility and Enterprise Responsiveness - Speed. He helps customers to get software engineering under control and rigorously increase their return-on-investment, time-to-market and productivity.

Rini is CTO at Prowareness We-On and also a professor in Globally Distributed Software Engineering at Delft University of Technology. In his research he investigates how to make global teams hyper-productive and how to decrease the impact of distance to zero

July 6, 2017 23D.M.vanSolingen@tudelft.nl - R.vanSolingen@prowareness.nl