On Tuesday, Jeff Sutherland and I will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Scrum’s first public appearance.
Those twenty years were my warm up for the next twenty, when I will focus on improving our professionalism. Specifically, I will be done when all Scrum teams deliver “done”, potentially shippable, in operations and usable, increments of software functionality. You can follow my progress at Scrum.org..
Why
Martin Fowler famously described the problem of undone increments at the end of Sprints as “flaccid software development.” This problem of delivering incomplete increments has haunted Scrum since its inception, Undone increments have led to unpredictable stabilization phases, as well as adding to technical debt. The persistence of undone increments has undercut our professionalism and relations with our customers.
As software has become an intrinsic part of our society, as continuous delivery and new technologies such as containers and micro services become mainstream, this problem becomes more pressing.
How
I, Scrum.org, and our community have prioritized this problem. In 2016, we will start developing and delivering SDKs (Scrum Development Kits) that describe done increments. The SDKs will describe how to develop and put done increments into operations (DevOps). These SDKs will support different development sets, including open source. The primary architectural options that reduce dependencies and technical debt will be supported. The SDKs will address small team and scaled (Nexus, Nexus+) development.
More early next year.
Ken
Ken Schwaber's Blog: Telling It Like It Is 
Looking forward to them
congratulations guys! An amazing milestone. I first saw a reference to Scrum in the book “Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions” and that was about 20 years ago, but it wasn’t about your well defined process. That book, and the ideas behind it, changed my life, just as the study of all approaches to software project management continues to change my life, every single day. Thanks for all your contributions to that domain.. But i still think it should be called “Rolling Maul” for rugby nit-pickers like me.
I met this flaccid scrum and its so prevalent. Sometimes senior executives accepts it and think its normal. The product owner knows its not normal but senior management says its OK.
“It’s Ok; Carry forward to next sprint”
they do this for next 20 sprints.
Congratulations on 20 years of moving an industry!
“Done” is so important, I’d say, because trust is so important. Say what you’ll do and do what you say. That’s no small feat in software development.
Dear Ken – congratulations on the milestone. As one of your early students 20 years ago (at IDX) – I still really appreciate Scrum to this day. You and Jeff started this amazing thing that still lives and is important today!! wow.
The concepts are sound. Sure there are problems to solve – I think Done describes this [last mile] problem well.
Software quality can’t be solved by process alone. It still requires skilled and thoughtful developers. Anyone can type code into a computer. Fewer understand “why” it works or doesn’t. Mentoring is an important part – plus refreshing the concepts. Even reverse mentoring – letting the young whipper-snappers teach the old dog a new trick.
And finally – Fire the QA department!
IDX. The memories, the learning, the very first Scrum Master!!
As long as Product Owners aren’t responsible for the long term viability of their systems and products, quality suffers.
Ken
I liked this article. It is quite valuable and informative one. Thanks for sharing. I would recommend you to also visit http://www.scrumstudy.com for more insights on Scrum & Agile.
It’s a joke…. right?
A wise man once said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” Maybe, Mr. William, silence would have been a better choice.
James did you just ask Ken to take a look at Scrumstudy? hehe..
Anyway…. Thanks Ken for just warming up! We look forward to the next 20 years. Great and amazing work so far.
You should go somewhere where your knowledge is more appreciated.
Hi Ken, any news about the SDK? Can I help?
hi Ken,
Any news regarding this SDK?
Regards,
Arnaud
Work in progress.
Any updates?
Not the SDK. An expansion into already well-known territory, though. Watch for our announcement on 11/17.
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