Australian Scrum Community

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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

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s cautiously optimistic post comes a warning from James Shore that agile is declining because a lot of agile teams are failing.

Now many people who call me already have Agile in place (they say), but they’re struggling. They’re having trouble meeting their iteration commitments, they’re experiencing a lot of technical debt, and testing takes too long.

Scrum, ScrumMaster certification and the Scrum Alliance all get a mention as part of the problem due to Scrum’s success in obtaining mindshare in the Agile world. This resulted in lots of interesting comments and additional blog posts. So far:

• James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile on InfoQ.
• The Decline and Fall of Agile and How Scrum Makes it Hurt More on the Adgile Advice blog.
• Dirty Rotten ScrumDrels by Uncle Bob at Object Mentor.

In the comments to his own post James Shore clarifies:

One thing I want to mention is that I don’t think Agile failures are because of Scrum. If XP was the dominant method, then we’d be seeing XP failures. (I do think, however, that XP fails quicker and more obviously, and is less likely to be introduced into situations where it can’t succeed.)

Although a lot of people have taken my essay to be a condemnation of Scrum, that wasn’t my intent. Instead, I was trying to highlight the failures that I see and the factors that contribute to those failures. The biggest problem isn’t Scrum or even CSM training, it’s people eating dessert and skipping their vegetables.

As Franck Villaume commented on the InfoQ post, parallels can be drawn from the long line of cool new things adopted by the IT industry. Once the hype cycle begins people start adopting the cool new thing just because others a doing it and, well, we all want to be working on cool stuff.

The problem is that many adopt the cool new thing without fully understanding it, or its implications on their people and their organisation at large. Some time later the results don’t meet the unrealistic expectations created by the hype, and people get disappointed. Then failures occur. Perhaps agile is in the trough of disillusionment.

However, after the reality check of a few failures some learning occurs. People start to understand where the technology is appropriate, and then adoption of that technology slowly increases.

With respect to Scrum, anyone who adopts Scrum and thinks that is all they need to “do agile” probably should take a closer look at what Scrum does not provide (a topic for another post).

Several voices on the Web are suggesting that the looming financial crisis presents an opportunity for agile development methods due to the focus on providing business value early and embracing change.

ThoughtWorks has an entire whitepaper devoted to the topic – Recession News for CIOs [PDF, 660 KB]. Tim Bray has also written a series of essays under the On Tough Times banner. (Read ‘em all.) His first essay is A Good Time for Agility:

There was a time when you could propose a project that called for so many months of requirements evaluation, so many months of design, and then development and eventually deployment sometime next year. No longer. Anything even faintly smelling of the waterfall model is increasingly DOA.

Later…

Someone needs to figure out some good contract structures to support outsourced agile development.

Well, that issue has been getting more attention lately:

• Vikas Hazrati posted an article on the Agile Contracts Working Group on InfoQ.
• Jeff Sutherland has some additional details on the working group.
• Serge Beaumont presented on Agile & Contracts at the Scrum gathering 2008 in Stockholm.
• Alistair Cockburn has been collecting ideas.

And there’s always Google: agile contracts

There have been a number of questions about the CSM Exam. To address these, here is an extract from a recent announcement from Dave Minor, Product Owner at the Scrum Alliance. Note that the exam will be introduced on April 1, 2009 (not January 1 as previously advised).

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The Scrum Alliance Board strongly believes that the value of any certification program lies in its ability to meet individuals’ diverse needs and interests for both breadth and depth of content so that it helps them improve the way they perform their job on a day-to-day basis. Meeting those needs required that we develop a body of Scrum knowledge. That body of knowledge was the framework for developing the standards and measurements for Scrum certification. This body of knowledge must be mastered by everyone who teaches, trains, coaches and practices in the use of Scrum.

In general, a profession becomes respected and its practitioners become trusted when standards are set for knowledge, skills and conduct and an assessment tool is developed to measure applicants against those standards. These standards help to define a profession, giving it the credibility that comes with the concrete evidence that its members have met certain criteria in order to practice that profession. As with other areas of expertise as diverse as law, accounting, cosmetology, medicine, SCUBA-diving, or engineering, the practice of Scrum brings with it a unique area of knowledge that can be measured through an exam at the completion of a training course.

This standard measurement not only helps to protect the integrity of Scrum as it continues to rapidly grow, but ensures that each ScrumMaster will possess a level of expertise that will enhance his or her professional endeavors. In other words, the ScrumMaster certification program with a final exam will help to ensure that the professionals practicing the Scrum framework have met a uniform standard of competency.

Launch Date

As the first step in rolling out its expanded certification program, the Scrum Alliance will launch the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) certification exam on April 1, 2009. Beginning April 1, ScrumMaster students worldwide will be required to take a training course and pass the CSM exam to qualify for certification.

Beta Testing

Psychometric beta testing for the CSM exam, which began during the Stockholm gathering, will continue through the end of the November. To date, more than 200 results have been captured through these beta tests. Upon completion of beta testing, the final item selection will be made to create multiple forms of the exam and set a passing standard (cut score).

Exam Process

After April 1, 2009, students who have completed a two-day CSM course will be able to take the certification exam by accessing their account on the Scrum Alliance web site created by the CST. Students who do not pass the exam on the first attempt will be able to retake it at any time. However, upon failing the exam a second or third time, students must wait one week before being allowed to retake it. Students who fail the exam a total of four times will be required to retake the CSM course before being allowed to retake the exam. Students will be required to pay a $20 exam processing fee for the third and fourth attempts.

Exam Objectives

The CSM exam will be a computer-based, non-proctored multiple-choice exam that covers objectives from four major Scrum topics. These exam objectives will be available on the Training and Certification page of the Scrum Alliance web site so that prospective candidates can prepare for the exam.

You can read more of the announcement including an FAQ over here on my new blog.

If you find yourself needing to work in a PRINCE2 environment, but want to leverage Scrum, here are two resources to get you started:

• Scrum and PRINCE2 Cross Reference by Julian Harris. Check out his Excel spreadsheet that maps between Scrum and PRINCE2.
• Scrum and Prince2: working together? by Scotty Wakefield.