Australian Scrum Community

Just a heads up that Ken Schwaber left a comment on yesterday’s Some Turbulence Expected post. If you’re accessing this site via an aggregator you may have missed it, so here it is:

Scrum doesn’t provide a lot of stuff. Instead, it exposes a lot of stuff. Like, whether you can build a potentially usable or shippable increment of software in one iteration, or sprint. That is very hard to do and most organizations don’t have the engineering skills and infrastructure to do so. We measure what they can do, and the rest of “undone” work has to be done at the end of the project or release, or stabilization phase. This includes stuff like refactoring, integration and regression testing, performance and stability testing, etc. That the developers can’t get this done within the iteration is terrible, and certainly backloads the whole project. However, now that we know exactly how bad it is, we can quantify the benefits of improving it. This certainly tests the engineering organization – do they want to go through the hard work of attaining competence, or would they rather change Scrum so their inadequacies are no longer visible.

Scrum will favor those who don’t change it and use its transparancy to identify and solve engineering problems. They will work to create a full, shippable increment every iteration. These will be great engineering organizations that will outcompete others every day. Think Toyota and GM.
Ken