Scrum But Replaced by Scrum And

April 5, 2012 Category Uncategorized 17 Comments

Five years ago, the term, “Scrum-But” became popular. This phrase pointed out the gap between just using Scrum-and building great products with Scrum. I would ask someone if they were using Scrum. They would respond, “We use Scrum, but we can’t always complete all the regression testing within a Sprint, so we often have regression testing spill over into the next Sprint.” Or, they might say, “Yes, we use Scrum, but we are a dispersed team, so we have the Daily Scrum whenever it works best, and often that is only several times a week.”

I’d like to change this phrase from Scrum But to Scrum And.  The new wording might be, “We use Scrum and we are continuously building, testing and deploying our increments every Sprint,” or “We use Scrum and we are collaborating and brainstorming within the Scrum Team to increase Value every Sprint.”

We are developing a Scrum-And framework  At the most basic level, the question is: Are you using Scrum or not (as defined in the Scrum Guide (www.scrum.org/guides). Scrum And is then a path of continuous improvement in software development beyond the basic use of Scrum. Equating the Scrum framework with the framework for chess, this is determining how good a product development organization you are just like determining how good of a chess player you are.

In Software in Thirty Days (Jeff and my new book), we map ways in which Scrum can be deployed. These are:

The Scrum And framework is mapped onto this deployment mapping as follows

 Starting with the Stacey graph, four threads of improvement beyond the framework are Scrum,Technology, People, and Business (domain). Organizations would probably improve in each thread at a different pace. Improvement in an organization’s skills in each thread would drive them from the basic Scrum usage to further stages. We expect that metrics such as productivity, quality, value, ROI, and total cost of ownership could be measured at each level.

Work is just beginning in Scrum.org and with its partners. When this is done, it should significantly supplement our Implementation Playbook. It should provide a guide for organizations that want to know how to start and how to improve their product and software development skills. This fits with Scrum.org’s mission, “Improving the profession of software development.”.

We will let you know when usable sets of this framework are available.

Ken