SCRUM is a great framework to adopt if you and your software development team wants to get things done. SCRUM works for us, so we encourage the people we work with to adopt it along with other Agile methods.

Here’s a few reasons why we like it:

• SCRUM can get you the highest business value in the shortest amount of time, assuming your priorities are right.
• It makes the release of your software less of a technical problem and more of a business decision
• It helps to project the amount of value your development team can deliver over a finite period of time
• It helps keep your development team and your product flexible so that it can change with the long-term needs of the business

We try to help all of our clients refine their product development process, so we’ve seen a few roadblocks that get in their way when adopting SCRUM. These are the top 5 ways to cause a SCRUM misfire:

1. Too Much, Too Soon

   Traditional development shops sometimes try to change their ways overnight. If you overwhelm developers with sweeping changes, it’s unlikely that everything will stick. There are many aspects to SCRUM and Agile, so why not take it one step at a time? First, you could start writing user stories. Second, you could start time-boxing your release plan. You can spread out the adoption and sell each facet of SCRUM on its own merit. Being a curmudgeon myself, I respond to change much better when it is spread out over time.

2. Being dogmatic and following the procedures to the letter

   SCRUM is a framework, not a dogma. It annoys me to no end when people criticize others for not having an “up to the letter” implementation of SCRUM. If you’re not changing your ways from iteration to iteration, you’re missing a lot of the benefit that SCRUM provides. During your retrospective, discuss what’s working and what isn’t. Change your ways for the next iteration, and see if things improve. Every company’s culture and operations are different, so why should you try to fit a round peg into a square hole? Bend SCRUM to your team’s will, and find what works for your organization.

   That being said, a lot of people think SCRUM is about having an open floor plan or rapidly changing requirements and development priorities without forethought. If you do only these things, you’re not practicing SCRUM or reaping any of its benefits.

3. No executive buy-in

   We’re getting warmer. It is so important to have C-level support for the long-term adoption of SCRUM and Agile methods. Take considerable time and effort with getting your executive team on board. When you miss your last few stories in a sprint (it will happen), your management team needs to understand the complexity and uncertainty around sprint planning, and how you already have a plan in place to address it.

4. A Bad Product Owner

   I’ve unfortunately seen this more times than I’d like to admit. Bad product owners mean bad user stories and priorities, which translates to sprints that miss the mark in terms of business value. Naturally, if stakeholders and board members aren’t seeing the results you’ve been promising, SCRUM will be forgotten as quickly as what they had for lunch two weeks ago. In the early stages of trying SCRUM out, work with your product owner intensively to make sure he or she is doing a good job of getting the right stories and priorities from stakeholders. If they can’t get make it work within a few sprints, you’ve got to respond quickly and find someone else to fulfill this important role.

5. Split Focus

   So you’ve got this great idea for implementing a framework where you can demonstrate predictable and reasonable estimates of what your team can do in a given slot of time. Your team members, though, are on about 4 different project teams and have their quarterly TPS reports due somewhere towards the end of the sprint. In my opinion, resources that are spread across multiple projects is the #1 cause of SCRUM death in an organization. Fight for your resources! If you can’t get a predictable and dedicated amount of time from your SCRUM team, how can you get can you accurately gauge velocity? If everyone has to work on multiple projects (which is a horrible idea), see if you can get them for dedicated times for every sprint. This will be really hard to do as the project priorities shift and fires need to be put out, so this should be a last resort. If you have some pull in the company, see if you can try restructuring project teams to be more dedicated. Nothing is more important for the successful adoption of SCRUM than protecting your team from distractions and the ever popular “Can you do me a favor?”. As a technical leader or someone that wants to see your product and SCRUM succeed, this is the battle you want to pick.

Are you struggling to get SCRUM working for you? What’s killing the adoption of SCRUM in your organization? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Jon Follett and I led a discussion on how designers can integrate with Agile development teams at a recent Refresh Boston event.

I’ve really come to enjoy and look forward to Refresh Boston events. The Microsoft NERD Center is a killer venue, and Patrick Haney (notasausage) does a great job in getting a diverse crowd and stellar speakers.

Of course, Jon did a tremendous job with designing the slides for the presentation

If you attended the talk, please rate and comment on us over at SpeakerRate. We definitely want to continue the learning and discussion around this topic.

Jon Follett and I did a lightning talk on swooping in to save projects from epic failure at Ignite Boston 5. It seems to be a topic that the audience had an interest in. We looked at our experiences and set out to provide some useful tips.

We had 5 minutes to get our points across. It was challenging but fun. It was a great event and there were lots of other great talks.

The slides are below.

To place further emphasis on the message – communication is a vital part of every project. We’ve inherited so many projects going wrong just because people aren’t being honest and open with each other. Communicate to educate, define norms, and demonstrate progress. These are not nice to haves in your projects – they’re requirements.

Do you have a project that needs rescuing? Contact us so that we can make your software idea a reality.

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a decent system to manage Second Rotation’s user stories. I have to say, I’ve been very impressed with Mingle. Last week, I worked on refining the story statuses for the life cycle of a user story once it is slated for an iteration. Here’s what we came up with:

• Awaiting Information – the engineering team is waiting on the stakeholder for information
• Ready For Development – the developer assigned the user story has all the information needed to commence work
• In Progress – the developer is working on the user story
• Ready for Staging – the developer has finished work on the user story, and it’s ready to be sent to our staging environment
• Staged – the story has been sent to our staging environment and is ready for testing
• Ready for Deployment – the story has been validated, both from a QA and stakeholder’s perspective. This means the user story is green lighted for production
• Complete – the story has been deployed to production

The value of defining these statuses within Mingle is the ability to define transitions. For example, I can report to stakeholders an average delay per user story because I track when a story enters and exits the Awaiting Information status. I can also track how well a developer is fulfilling requirements. If a user story is consistently Staged and then reverted to In Progress, This is all done automatically as the story owner moves it through the life cycle we’ve created.

Another huge analytic – I’ll be able to track estimation quality by comparing planning estimates to the duration of a story having the status of “In Progress”

Eventually, I want to refine these story statuses to reflect what’s done before a user story is assigned to an iteration.

One thing I wish Mingle had that causes a major gap in my regular status reports is the ability to correlate many user stories to a project. Business stakeholders do not usually respond well to a long list of stories, so being able to report status on a project by project basis would be ideal. Thoughtworks (the developers of Mingle) reports that this will be a feature in an upcoming release.

If you’re managing an Agile Software Development project, I highly recommend you check out Mingle.