Scrum is by far the most popular of the Agile processes. In fact, when software companies say they are doing agile development you can be pretty sure they are talking about Scrum.
The question that is worth asking is “How successful is Scrum over the long haul? Are we seeing diminishing returns after say a year of practice?” My own experience as an agile instructor and coach has been mixed. At the beginning of the organization’s transformation there is great excitement and desire to blow the doors off of productivity. After a couple of rocky sprints, the teams do become hyper productive. And everyone’s happy…for a while.
A dozen sprints (or so) later we begin to consistently see the following complaints from both management and the team:
- We’ve never been able to get our sprint backlog to “done”. There’s never enough time at the end of the sprint for thorough testing. This leads to mounting technical debt.
- Daily meetings made sense in the beginning but they’re not adding much value any more. Scrum Masters find it increasingly difficult to maintain enthusiastic participation during daily stand ups.
- Certain work items are long-running-tasks by their nature: database upgrades and conversions come to mind and can’t fit into a single sprint. Splitting them up doesn’t always make sense.
- Certain individuals like to specialize in their craft like UI design, database; Scrum values cross-functional skill sets over specialization.
- Management wants more responsiveness and engagement from the team as soon as and opportunity arises. Waiting until the start of the next sprint is not acceptable in many cases.
- Management needs more visibility and top-down input into the whole program, not just individual teams. The Scrum-of-scrums is a weak substitute for this since it’s designed to be bottom up.
Kanban is a much better process once the system has reached a steady state and the focus becomes process improvement, maturity and improved cycle times.
Scrum is an outstanding process to adopt when you want a radical departure from the past or if you’re a start up. Scrum is disruptive and pretty heavy by its nature but results in huge productivity increases in the short-term. But if you’re a mature company with an existing revenue stream from products you’re better off starting where you’re at and making conscious, gradual and continuous process improvements using Kanban. I believe this approach is both more affective as well as politically prudent.
As in every craft, it’s important to use the best tool for the job. In my opinion, Scrum is being used in many situations where Kanban is a more appropriate fit. As an agile coach it’s my job to steer my clients towards the most suitable processes for them. I think over the next year, we’ll be seeing many Scrum shops migrate towards Kanban as their products, processes and teams mature.
-Armond Mehrabian
Senior Consultant, Portofino Solutions, Inc.
amehrabian@portofinosolutions.com
