Microsoft Lauds Scrum

under_score writes "According to eWeek.com Microsoft is adopting the agile methodology called Scrum to get software built faster. Is it working? They seem to be claiming that Scrum and Extreme Programming have helped them get recent releases such as SQLServer out the door faster with better quality. Many other large organizations are also adopting agile methods including Yahoo, and Google. Are agile methods the next big thing in software development?"

Comments

A good example?

[blowdart]

So Scrum was used on SQL Server? The SQL Server product that's very late and has had to have features disabled. Or was it used on Visual Studio 2005 perhaps? The one where they've already announced a service pack before the official launch date because people are so unhappy?

These are scrum successes? I'd hate to see the failures.

Re:This is a new thing?

[bwy]

Well, yeah, we call that a daily team meeting. Been going on since, oh, forever.

The daily stand-up is only a small component of Scrum. And the purpose of the meeting is strictly related to which tasks from the sprint backlog you were working yesterday, which ones you'll be working today, and whether or not you have any impediments. Only pigs are allowed to speak in the daily stand-up. This means that chickens (product owners, business folks, etc.) are only observers and can't butt in and introduce scope creep. How many times in a traditional waterfall methodology have you had someone add to your scope in a daily meeting? Every day they want to change a page, add a column to the database, change the way something works, etc. This goes on to the point where the product never gets delivered. Under scrum you deliver something every 30 days and at that point the product owner can decide if he really wants to change something- and he does this by adding it to the product backlog- not by grabbing someone in the hallway.

Re:This is a new thing?

[Zigurd]

Scrum is the upshot of the fact that standard project tracking tools don't adapt well to software projects. You can't see the difference between 30% or 70% of the coding on a large task being complete, so Scrum tells you not to have tasks that large and to only count something complete when it is 100% complete. Even the XP rule of thumb that tasks should not take more than a week to complete is too coarse-grained.

Scrum admonishes the manager to ask "What got completed today?" If the answer is "Nothing." then you don't really know if project completion is closer or not.

That is common sense, but it is uncommon in projects that have misapplied project management tools.