segunda-feira, 5 de abril de 2010

Scrum and the context

When Scrum become popular a few years ago, promoted a sharp turnaround in the development community. That's because, much more than a new methodology, Scrum advocates a new approach, a new philosophy in software development - strongly based on the ideas of the agile manifesto.

By encouraging practices like having a customer representative directly involved in the design or maintenance of self-managed teams Scrum directly influences the structure, the culture of organizations – it interferes in what is called the team context: the environment in which it falls. Obviously these changes are usually costly and sometimes impractical.

As agile methodologies grow in popularity, also grows the questioning of its efficacy. In this context, rises a group that advocates grater rigidity in the team’s context maintenance. According to this group, establishing that an agile methodology is made up of a predefined set of practices, without taking the context into account is nonsense since some of these practices could turn into pure bureaucracy – the one thing agile methods seek to eliminate!

Also it’s important to notice that the agile manifesto says nothing about keeping the customer close to the development team or even on shorter construction cycles. These are concepts of Scrum and it is certainly possible to have an agile team without these characteristics.

On the other hand, saying that the methodology must bow to the context is inappropriate. Due to its innovative nature, adopting an agile methodology requires at least some cultural and structural adaptation. If it is to ignore the breadth of the change that the introduction of an agile methodology requires, you’re certainly better off not starting at all!

The ideal path, I beleave, is the middle way: adaptation of the context as appropriate and judicious adoption of practices always taking the context into account. What then would be the measure of this balance? The team of course. After all, we must not forget that individuals and their interaction are more important processes and tools.
References
 http://xprogramming.com/blog/2009/01/30/context-my-foot/
http://www.noop.nl/2009/02/the-decline-and-fall-of-agilists.html
http://jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Agile.html
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html

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