Last week, Jurgen Appelo wrote an article called Scrumbuts are the best part of Scrum. I followed up with my Scrumbuts are the downfall of Agile post. Ultimately Jurgen and I are in agreement – it is important to be able to have the maturity to modify a process and not be holden to it’s ways when they aren’t working. However, it is vital not to just change a process because you lack the context to see when something isn’t working because of your team’s failings.
To help address, this, I’d like to take the high-level areas from Henrik Kniberg’s Scrum Checklist and discuss when it is and is not appropriate to modify them. They are:
- Timeboxed Iterations
- Team members sit together
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint Planning Meetings / Sprint Backlog
- Retrospective after every sprint
- Demo happens after every sprint
- Clearly defined Product Owner / PO has a product backlog
- Have Definition of Done
It is my hope that this series will help show the differences about when ScrumButs are a great thing – and when they most certainly are not.
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