Real Scrum, Pseudo Scrum

Before we embarked on the current, real scrum project, we did a project with pseudo scrum.

A big project was on the way. An enthusiastic engineer and his manager thought of giving scrum a try. They approached the company's project management department and the like minded project manager picked up the idea. None of these were trained in Scrum. They started reading the bible - Agile Software Development with Scrum.

The three musketeers got buy in from some more people and the project began. While the project was in progress, they fumbled, they sinned. Their daily scrums went on for 45 minutes!. They did not track remaining hours and there was no burndown chart. Developers flaunted their individual achievements in the sprint demos. They could not fit QA in the scrum and had to resort to parallel staggered QA sprints.

But they did not let the scrum spirit die. They religiously followed the incremental approach, their design decisions were based on the team consensus. The stories were end to end. They wrote lots of unit tests. The incremental, iterative approach caught on momentum. The engineering enjoyed it, the product rejoiced it. Their good karma paid off and project was a huge success! QA was amazed with the code quality.

They were able to build a new website with a complex domain model in mere 4 months. The whole company was amazed with this success. The success got them thinking about scrum seriously.

Few months passed by. A new big project was about to come. The project management team, realizing power of the scrum, decided to get Scrum Master Certification training. The training opened their eyes. They realized what they did wrong, as well as their good deeds. The training was just about right for the people who have tried scrum once.

This is how the current project began. It is our first attempt to implement text book scrum - the real scrum. I will keep you posted about our experiences through this blog.

I strongly recommend - just try it out! Once you try it, you will realize why it works