Wednesday, February 11, 2009

This is not "pure" Scrum

Reading: This is not "pure" ScrumTweet this Post

Just some background. I've been doing traditional Product Mgmt and Marketing for some time now. Over the last few years I've transitioned to Agile Product Management and my posts here will mostly reflect my journey from traditional to Agile.

We are currently Scrumming, but not in its purest sense and keep hearing comments like "thats not pure Scrum".

Well from what I've seen Scrum is very contextual and a framework that leaves a lot of the details for the team to decide on how they want to do things. So there is nothing like pure Scrum.

And by the way saying that User Stories not written in the now famous Mike Cohn format of "As a type of user, I want some goal so that some reason" is not Scrum .. is ridiculous at best.
I respect Mike and his writing a lot, especially his "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" book that's kinda like a bible for Product Owners. However I do believe that some stories have to be contorted to meet this format and sometimes there is a lot of redundancy in this format as well. Imagine 40 stories starting with "As a Sales Rep ...". So well written user stories in any format (user stories, use cases etc) should do for Scrum. Tyner Blain has a wonderful blog posted on this that I would recommend to any team transitioning from WF to Agile.

I'd like to hear more from people who are doing "pure" Scrum .. have large product lines in the enterprise software space with legacy code, bug fixes and globally distributed teams.

No comments:

Post a Comment