Thursday, November 20, 2008

Topic: Software Development

Reference: Stuart, Jenny.“10 Keys to Successful Scrum Adoption.” Construx: Best Practices White Paper. www.construx.com/whitepapers.

I have been investigating ways to improve the service delivery of application and software development. Traditional project management offers some significant benefits in decision making, coordination, and planning. However, it also suffers at times from communication problems, scope creep, and supporting production delays.  A new twist on Agile software development can be found in the “scrum” process. Scrum has many of the attributes of project management, but features, rapid service delivery (sprint), decentralized decision making, and aggressive learning from each sprint. In the referenced article the commentator indicates that one of the first things that must be done is to determine whether your environment will support the scrum process. In making that determination technical leaders should look to factors like customer involvement, talent in the organization, projects involving incremental development, and a supportive infrastructure. “Supportive infrastructure includes the ability to perform daily or continuous builds, perform automated validation of the builds, conduct automated unit testing and regression testing, and promote and release builds.” Scrum also includes incremental customer value delivery, self-empowered teams, and continuous learning.  Scrums also encourage tailoring the process, deliverables, and others to the culture and capabilities of the organization. With the help of a ScrumMaster (facilitator), Delivery Team (talent), and Product Owner (product developer), projects are encouraged to be worked across disciplines, tasks, and a detailed product roadmap.  The keys seem to be to focus on product value as well as customer value. Where the relative values make sense, scrum is a value added tool that should be in your product delivery bag. Scrum looks to be an interesting process and one worthy of further investigation. I urge you to investigate it and let me know your thoughts.

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