Does SCRUM alone = agile?

Question

I'm hearing about a lot of companies that act like they're agile but the only agile thing they do is the SCRUM process. Is this enough to be considered agile? Using SCRUM alone seems like the perfect excuse for a bad manager to get more meetings more often. Should I be weary of such companies?

Answer 1

Using SCRUM alone is not necessarily an excuse to get more meetings. Being able to track the work that's done every day and make decisions on how to modify (by cutting or rebalancing work) the rest of the sprint is quite useful on it's own and sound agile to me. :-)

Of course, if you don't have the other components of the agile process, you will have harder time to measure the success of your work, so you might think you are on track with the sprint, but in fact be nowhere near the point you should be at to deliver quality product on schedule.

Update: You shouldn't dismiss such company on that premise alone. HOwever, during the interview, you should use the chance to understand why they are using only SCRUM. If it's a matter of not having people to champion things like TDD or CI, than it might be a good fit for you, if you are willing to become the technical lead. If it's because they dismiss these processes as "overhead" or "stupid" or "unnecessary", then you should be wary of the company.

Answer 2

I've noticed that just using SCRUM meetings alone is a pretty clear sign that the company has not correctly implemented Agile concepts.

Think about how easy SCRUM meetings are, just fire up Outlook and give everyone a daily 15 minute meeting. But, slicing everything up into quick iterations and making sure new functionally is rapidly tested by end users takes a lot more work.

I'd guess, that most managers stop reading right after the SCRUM part and they lose interest. But, their daily meeting requests live on forever.

Answer 3

Bad managers will be outed by the transparency that SCRUM promotes. Companies truely embracing SCRUM are definitely worth a look.

Answer 4

Agile is a big, vague concept. Lots of things are Agile.

Scrum is a specific set of techniques for doing sprints and releases. It's agile because it fits the Agile Manifestor.

There are lots of other specific Agile techniques (all of the xDD's, for example.)

When in doubt, compare the companies actual practices against the Agile Manifesto.

Answer 5

"I'm hearing about a lot of companies that act like they're agile but the only agile thing > they do is the SCRUM process. Is this enough to be considered agile"

Short answer - yes. In my opinion anyway :-)

Of course - they have to be actually doing Scrum - rather than just sticking the name on the wall. There's a lot more to Scrum than daily stand-ups... and if that's all they're doing they're not doing it right.

Done correctly Scrum forces companies to identify the bottlenecks in how the organisation is running. By setting up regular timeboxed sprints, getting a decent feedback loop, and splitting responsibility across product owner and team appropriately you actually get useful baseline information on how to improve your process.

The organisation has to listen to that feedback - and act on it.

It's certainly not the only way to do agile. It might not even be the best way to introduce agile into an organisation. I'm more of an XP fan myself - and find that the extra practices provide a useful framework for kick-starting those process improvements.

That said - for many organisations - the biggest problem is bad split of responsibilities & the complete lack of a sane and rapid feedback loop. Scrum fixes that out of the gate.

Meetings are a very small part of that :-)

Answer 6

Scrum is a project management methodology, first and foremost. Yes, if you are doing Scrum, you are probably beginning to think more about being agile, and delivering value to your customer. But it does not necessarily make you agile. For starters, Scrum doesn't talk about HOW you do software development. This is where things like XP come in - other methodologies and ideas that force you to review and change your working practices in order to become more efficient and effective.

So, rather than asking "do you do Scrum / XP / whatever" I would ask these companies about their overall processes and take a holistic view. Is the company focussing on delivery of maximum business value and driven by an ethos of continuous improvement? If so, then they are probably a lot more agile than one that says it does Scrum.

Answer 7

Scrum provides you with a framework to fix/improve your development process. It should be considered as a starting point to "jelled team" and more productive team. Most likely you will go beyond standard Scrum practices soon, but as a starting point it has some attractive properties:

1. It is very easy to understand
2. It can be applied to almost any project and team
3. There are quite many people who make money and help companies with Scrum adoption

Also there it is really not so important to know whether Scrum = agile. It is better to focus on better productivity and do not bother yourself with such questions.

Answer 8

Yeah, I'd agree with some of the sentiment here. Be Agile is following the manifesto and assuring that you have the right alignment of priorities. SCRUM is just another variant with specific pieces written down. It is, if anything a management "tool".

With that said, remember, the tools are secondary, your people are your priority. Don't over-focus on the management style, focus instead of the people and the product.

Answer 9

It's not possible to tell whether a team is agile just because somebody says that they're doing scrum.

There are good and bad scrum implementations but they key things about agile are:

• the ability of the project and team to think flexibly
• how self-organising the team is (do they have a control freak "architect" or manager? or is there a considerable amount of consensus decision making?)

It's all too easy to conform to the minimum requirements of what a team needs to do to be doing scrum without being truly agile. Those minimum requirements are only there to bring about a certain attitude and way of working.

It's possible for decision-making in a project to be ridgidly inflexible and controlled top-down and yet conform to the minimum requirements of scrum. Sadly, when I look for contracting engagements, I find the scrum-in-name only implementations outnumber the real thing by a considerable margin.

Personally, I'd choose to implement extreme programming within scrum. (In fact, Jeff Sutherland says he's never seen a top productivity scrum team that didn't do the XP practices.) However, I'm pretty confident that people could implement XP really badly too... ;-) It really comes down to the attitude in the team.

Answer 10

Organization practicing only Scrum would most likely be seeing gains on software management and project visibility front. However, they are most likely not achieving a higher engineering quality and throughput potential by not incorporating XP principles like Unit Testing, Continuous Integration, Pair Programming etc., leaving their end of Sprint product NOT "Potentially Shippable".