Tough times out there - Scrum can show you the way out!

"In these tough economic times" I've heard this so many times it's starting to annoy me. Yet, this little proverb is sublimely relevant; it taps into the psyche of consumers and businesses alike who continue to say to themselves "Can we afford this?" Corollary to the fear, budgets shrink, revenues disappear, and company objectives change from thriving to surviving. As the recession shows no signs of letting up companies continue to move with extreme trepidation forgoing any projects that appear even slightly risky. This is very bad news for software projects.

Can SCRUM be used for testing projects only?

Yesterday there was a post from a user group member "Do you have experience in driving a SCRUM project only for testing?"

Of course many folks pitched in to try and help. However one thing that perturbed me about some of the responses is just how quickly folks are to jump to conclusions that this sort of thing is NOT Agile and just another great example of Scrum-But.

The product owner - top 10 responsibilities

Over the course of the past 5 years, I have often been asked about the role the Product Owner plays in an Agile company. More recently in a rather controversial blog post by Adam Bullied he raised the question – Is there such a thing as an Agile Product Manager?

Stretching user stories across sprint boundaries

There was a great debate going on in one of the Agile Linked-in forums yesterday. The question put to the audience was this - they have a user story that never seems to end. They wanted to know how to best deal with this situation, i.e. do they count some story points towards the previous sprints velocity, do they split the user story up into multiple sprints etc.

Doing the Right thing vs Doing it Right

Photo by: Teuobk

In a recent thought provoking blog post by Allan Kelly titled "Requirements Come Second", Allan makes the case for resolving the development process side of the business first before addressing alignment issues with the business.

It's probably one of the most interesting blogs for a while and there have been lots of good comments made. I suggest you read the full article. I guess I can't argue with the data. However I don't think it's that hard to work on both sides simultaneously. And I truly believe that the Scrum process makes it easy to address both requirements and development process at the same time assuming you are following the prescribed Scrum practices. Let me explain....

Scrum requires that you have a single Backlog of requirements and that you have a single owner of the Backlog - the Product Owner. The Product Owner is responsible for sequencing the Backlog and therefore he can't be doing this in isolation of the business. Scrum also prescribes that teams identify Sprint goals at the start of every iteration. These goals need to be aligned with the business overarching vision and strategy.

Bottom line is that adopting Scrum is going to help your company get aligned with the business and of course will help you with the development process at the same time. Additionally, I still believe that the biggest risk of all is delivering the wrong Product so I think it's prudent to deal with this side of the business as well. Why not?

I personally don't buy doing one without the other. And Scrum really helps you to address both at the same time.

Written by Jack Milunksy - COO at Brightspark, certified ScrumMaster and Co-founder of Agilebuddy (Agile project management software that lets you easily Create, Estimate, Plan and Track your software development projects). For great Agile tips follow Jack at: www.twitter.com/agilebuddy. To get more info on Agilebuddy please visit: www.agilebuddy.com