Scrum vs ScrumAnd vs ScrumBut: Which one are you doing? :: Agile Tour London 2016

Scrum vs ScrumAnd vs ScrumBut:
which one are you doing?
October 2016

Pedro Gustavo Torres
Being Agile since 2010
RAD & Agile Lead
@_pedro_torres

The 2015 State of Scrum Report

Team
• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Development Team
Artifacts
• Product Backlog
• Sprint Backlog
• Increment
• Definition of Done
(Transparency)
Events
• The Sprint
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective
Scrum in a (Scrum Guide, July 2016)
Framework / Empirical process (Inspection, Adaption, Transparency)
Values
• Commitment
• Courage
• Focus
• Openness
• Respect

Scrum brings clarity to your work

Learning Scrum – Shu Ha Ri
Vanilla Scrum Beyond Scrum?ScrumAnd
ScrumBut
Shuhari roughly translates to "first learn, then detach, and finally transcend."
•shu (守) "protect", "obey" — traditional wisdom — learning fundamentals, techniques, heuristics, proverbs
•ha (破) "detach", "digress" — breaking with tradition — detachment from the illusions of self
•ri (離) "leave", "separate" — transcendence — there are no techniques or proverbs, all moves are natural,
becoming one with spirit alone without clinging to forms; transcending the physical
Thanks to Alistair Cockburn & Martin Fowler
Scrum doesn’t work?

Scrum – Addons vs Mod(ifications)s
Framework
Scrum

Saint Basil’s Cathedral
Addon
ScrumAnd

St Pancras Station
Modification
ScrumBut

La Sagrada Familia today
Framework
Scrum

La Sagrada Familia in the future
Addon
ScrumAnd

La Pedrera (Casa Milà)
Modification
ScrumBut

Scrum
ScrumAnd
We use Scrum, AND…
(with Addons)

ScrumAnd
“…When I was on my first Agile project, Ward Cunningham, one of our
project coaches, said to me “Mitch, you need to adopt the XP
engineering practices of TDD, pairing, refactoring and continuous
integration or you’ll be sorry.” I dismissed this claim as I knew what I
was doing. It was not until we were four sprints in when we all realized
that we were screwed….”
Thanks to Mitch Lacey

ScrumAnd – Popular Addons (1/23)
We estimate in points… or maybe #NoEstimates at all!

We do sprint zero

We have grooming / refinement sessions

We have prioritization sessions

We use XP practices

We limit WIP (Work in Progress = Work at Risk)
Thanks to
David Legge
@thecodecleaner

We use swarming (focusing on one story at a time)

Developing and testing story by story (parallelism instead of mini waterfalls)

We have multiple reviews per sprint (we don’t wait till the end of the
sprint to gather feedback)

We have all the team testing when needed (usually by the end of the sprint)

We don’t break user stories into tasks (it was only getting us slower)

Our team members have t-shaped skills (cross-functional)

Our sprints start on Mondays and finish on Fridays

All our teams are aligned (sprint wise)

Our teams size is 7+-2

We invite everyone in the department to assist to our Sprint Reviews

We release often and during the sprint without (a lot of) effort

We celebrate learning… not failure

The Scrum Master is trying to be unnecessary (putting himself out of his job)

We have 80% test / code coverage (Unit tests)

We do code reviews (or we work with pull requests)

After starting with directive Scrum… we now let teams grow freely

We collaborate so closely to our customers that they fall into the "IKEA
effect"

ScrumBut
We use Scrum, BUT…
Scrum
(with Modifications)

ScrumBut
(ScrumBut) (Reason) (Workaround)
Thanks to Ken Schwaber & Ron Jeffries
We use Scrum, but
having a Daily Scrum
every day is too much
overhead, so we only
have one per week.
We use Scrum, but
Retrospectives are a
waste of time, so we
don't do them.
We’re doing
Scrum, but
Retrospectives
aren’t effective, so
we only do them
monthly.
We’re doing Scrum, but
our stakeholders are
too busy to come to
Sprint Reviews, so we
stopped doing them.
We’re doing Scrum, but
we couldn’t get
everything done in two
weeks, so now we just let
our Sprints run as long as
they need to

ScrumBut – “Popular” modifications (1/33)
Our team members think of “my“ sprint / tasks / stories / story points
instead of “our” sprint / tasks / stories / story points

We have a waterfall inside the sprint (testing only starts after all the coding
is “done”)

We have QAs / Testers working outside the team / sprint

QAs don’t speak to Devs whenever they find bugs (processes and tools
over individuals and interactions)

The team works for the KPIs and not for the (potential) value delivered

The team can't implement (technically) a story without the Dev Lead
(or Architect)

We don’t have a DoD (nor a DoR)

The PO is a “chicken” (isn’t allowed to speak in Dailies and can’t attend
Retrospectives)

We use 6 to 12 weeks sprints (instead of 1 to 4 weeks) to “avoid pain” /
“disguise problems” (e.g. releases, manual regression testing, deploys to
test environments)

After a sprint we “stop” for 1 week of acceptance tests / bugfixing /
stabilization (non consecutives sprints)

Team members arrive late to scrum ceremonies

We have titles inside the team (Associate, Senior, etc.)

We don’t have a Sprint Goal

Besides a Product Backlog we also have a Technical Backlog and a Bugs
Backlog (so you can guess which backlog as higher priority)

We have Daily scrums away from the physical / virtual board

We do Big Design Up Front (BDUF) instead of favoring emerging
architectures and the Lean & XP concepts Last Responsible Moment (LRM),
You Aren’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI) and Just in Time (JIT)

We only have one person on our development team

In groomings / refinements the Scrum Master assigns user stories to
developers (command and control vs self-organizing)

In Sprint Planning we focus more in having everybody busy (due to
specializations) instead of focusing on the maximum value we can deliver
(output)... So we cherry pick / choose the stories that go in the sprint by
the skills / comfort zone of each developer

We don’t have a Scrum Master… not even a Product Owner (they are
M.I.A.)

We argue all the time about who is responsible for doing what (roles
indefinition)

The Product Owner doesn’t have time to write “decent” user stories

We stopped doing important things (e.g. visit customers, supporting UAT)
because “that's not scrum”

Our team is not cross functional

We have partially allocated team members (e.g. Developers)

We have horizontal and not vertical teams so we can’t deliver working
software (increments) by the end of the sprint without depending on
all teams
Thanks to Jonathan Rasmusson

We have horizontal and not vertical stories so we can’t deliver working
software (increments) by the end of the sprint

We split user stories between development and testing
Development Testing

Each story has an estimate for backend, frontend, integration and
testing
User Story
1
5
2
3

We are just worried about the How and not the Why

We don’t know our velocity

We don’t have any predictability whatsoever

We focus on idle workers and not on idle work

For what it matters… don’t forget that your goal is to make (awesome)
software… and not to (just) do Scrum
Final remarks
There is nothing “wrong“ in modifying the Scrum framework… you just
shouldn’t (probably) call it Scrum! And (at least) make sure that you are
doing it for the right reasons!
In the end… It is not about effectiveness (ScrumBut) but about
efficiency (ScrumAnd)
Frameworks don’t fail… people do!

Scrum vs ScrumAnd vs ScrumBut:
which one are you doing?
Obrigado! Thank you! Gracias! 

Scrum vs ScrumAnd vs ScrumBut: Which one are you doing? :: Agile Tour London 2016

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