Scrum as a software development methology

Question

Which organisations are best suited for use of Scrum methodology and why?

Answer 1

Scrum is not a development methodology, it is a project management methodology. Scrum is about managing workload and resources, and removing impediments to progress, and surfacing results at regular intervals to the whole team (including stakeholders).

Think to yourself:

• could your dev/project teams benefit from a daily or bi-daily catchup meeting?
• when you have design or project meetings, do the wrong people hog all the attention?
• do you need to draw a distinction between various stake holders in a project?
• could your team benefit from an iterative process, where "releases" are done frequently (i.e. every 3 or 4 weeks), and bugs and features are carefully prioritised against each other by the product manager?

Answer 2

The smallest team we have that uses something scrum-alike consists of 3 devellopers (2 full, 1 part-time), the stakeholder and the scrum-master ('secretary'). It works very well and we are planning to switch other small project teams to this method soon. There are some 'points' you have to keep in mind:

• We have the project status in an excel table under revision control, that is updated at least after the very short daily meeting.

• The review and planning meeting is scheduled biweekly on a given day and will not be moved until all participants agree.

• In all metings we break down the tasks from backloglist to smaller ones of max. 2 days of work, depending on the task type (concept, prototype, product etc). This proved to be the most valuable means to get reliable estimations!

• If the stakeholder needs an status update or needs to adjust priorisation he can have a look at the excel table and change it, so even if he's not participating the planning meeting he has enough impact on project devellopment

• The most important influence on management style is that you have evidence on what a given change would cost and what you can achieve until a given date (thing of a release date or a fair trade).