How to Justify Scrum to Senior Management

Often many people say that it is difficult to justify Scrum to the senior management. I think there are two alternative approaches you can take to justify Scrum:
If the senior management is willing to listen , you can tell them about the following scrum benefits:

• None of the software development methodologies can predict the exact date of software completion with exact amount of resources. In most cases where inputs and outputs are not well defined, empirical process control model is the only workable model for software development. Read chapter 5, Agile Software Development with Scrum.

• Prioritized product backlog ensures that 80% of the business value is delivered in 20% of the time. Read Appendix D, Agile Project Management With Scrum.

• Product gets a legitimate chance to change their product based on sprint demos. There is no need to file a change request and charge more in case of a fixed bid and/or fixed date contracts. Scrum being a transparent process, it gives more visibility to the management than waterfall, which provides no visibility till the time the product is finally released.
  

• Once Scrum is in place, it is possible to estimate release dates roughly based on historical velocity data. In fact, you will be able to predict release dates of the current project with 80% probability after 20% of the work is done - within 3 to 5 sprints based on the project size.

• Scrum exposes problems earlier, there by giving a chance for management to cancel the project if necessary.

• If you are a high maturity company, then using Scrum will improve productivity and performance significantly as concluded by Jeff Sutherlands's paper - Scrum and CMMI Level 5: The Magic Potion for Code Warriors
  

If the senior management is not willing to listen, you have no choice but to do the analysis first and give them a date. You may not be able to score with a management not willing to listen to new ideas.

Why Agile is hard?

I was talking with some developers and a manager of a company in LA about their Scrum implementation. They told me about various problems they faced - no buy in from business, inability to estimate exact dates etc.

Interestingly, at the same time, I happened to listen to Why Agile is Hard - The java Posee round up 08 podcast. Same problems were discussed in the podcast. The podcast mentions many interesting books and websites for agile followers. If you are an agile devotee, you should definitely listen to this podcast.

The developers from the company also talked about implementing Scrum only in the engineering team without getting buy in from the business. The business will give them a document of requirements which will be translated into user stories by a team lead.

One developer even told me about doing database design out of scrum sprints to avoid future changes. I think this is fundamentally wrong and against the spirit of Scrum. This is a typical case when unit tests are not implemented. Code without unit tests is difficult to re-factor hence developers tend to think about future requirements; there by defeating the purpose of iterative and incremental approach

Their other problem was accommodating QA in a sprint mainly because the testing was manual. I tried convincing them QAing within the sprint instead of doing staggered QA sprints. I suggested that they should try to automate the tests. While developers are working on the code, QA should work on creating / changing the automated tests.

They hadn't read the bible - Agile Software Development with SCRUM (Series in Agile Software Development). I suggested them to start with the book. Careful reading of this book will answer many of their questions. I also agree with one of the person in the podcast - start with small changes. Specifically for people who don't have unit tests. They need to start with unit testing first.