Thoughts On Agile And Scrum

So i have been working in the Scrum and Agile metholodology for many years now. I feel like i could share some of my thoughts.

In the first 2 years of my career, I worked in a hedge fund start-up that tried to adopt scrum. We had our daily stand-up meeting, sprint planning, product backlog, retrospective, etc.

Unfortunately, the system did not work out.

• It was full of bugs.
• It was launched 2 years late.
• The features was no longer valid by the time it was deployed.
• We lost our credibility and trust from the management.

The development team was eventually shut down.

What went wrong? In my opinion, we were following the scrum process and framework but not the extreme programming practices. To me, scrum and agile should complement and work together to contribute to a project success. Scrum does not mention anything about agile software development principles and practices. Test driven development and continuous build dramatically reduce bugs and integration problems that can surface later on.

Ultimately, Scrum’s objective is to deliver working software at the end of every sprint (2 to 4 weeks). Delivering software in smaller sprints has excellent return on investment, see agile economics. However, just following scrum without extreme programming practices doesn’t build software team that can deliver working software constantly. This can only be achieve by writing good code, practicing test driven development, continous build and integration. This is because all these techniques and practices promote software agility.

In my current organization, I am glad to say that we are doing proper agile and scrum, keeping technical debt low, delivering new features weekly and exceeding business expectations.