Friday, April 1, 2011

The main pillars of Scrum according to me

In this post I'll share with you what I think are the most valuable pieces of Scrum, pieces I'm never willing to compromise over.

Iterative/incremental
Scrum is truly iterative mandating to produce a fully functional increment of the final product, including at least some business functionality, in each sprint. In addition each sprint ends with a sprint review and retrospective making the feedback loop explicit.

Transparency 
In Scrum everything is visible. Any misconception in the organisation, design or infrastructure is pulled into the light. Honesty is just the first name!

Continuous improvement
Fast feedback loops, in larger and larger circles, and transparency are a solid ground for continuous improvement both to the product under development and to the process itself. Always strive to do things faster and with higher quality than the last time around.

Self-managing teams 
Scrum is based on the belief that a team of professionals is most effective if left alone to organise, solve its problems and work towards the sprint goal instead of having management telling them what to do and how to do it. Managers are to take the role of facilitators/sponsors making sure the team has everything it needs to produce as much value as possible.

Definition of done 
When is a task done? In order to truly complete a piece of work and deliver a high quality increment it is absolutely vital to have a solid definition of done. Any work that should have been done to get the increment ready for production will not go away if left undone. Instead it will accumulate over the following iterations and add up exponentially to a large, undefined, piece of work requiring a stabilisation phase of unknown length to meet quality criteria.

These are my fundamental values which I try to stick to. What do you think? Do you have other/additional most pressures parts?

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