scrumbut

October 13, 2006 at 12:05 pm

As somebody who is interested in Scrum but hasn’t yet had a chance to try it, I’ve been paying attention to the various experiences people are having with it.


I’ve been noticing something for a while, but I didn’t really realize that there was something bigger going on.


I call that phenomena “Scrumbut”. It shows up in the following way:


We’re doing Scrum but…



  • our sprints are 12 weeks long…

  • we do two normal sprints and one bugfix sprint…

  • we do all our planning up front…

  • we skip the daily meeting…

  • our managers decide what’s in each sprint…

  • we haven’t read the books yet…

  • our team has 30 people…

I’m not a strict methodologist – a specific methodology may need to be adapted to a specific situation. But most of these are anti-scrum rather than modified-scrum.


That this phenomena exists may not be news to you, and it wasn’t to me. But what I realized this last week is that scrumbut has led to another phenomena…


Namely, it has led to scrum being a naughty word. Managers are working with groups that say they are doing scrum, and then when scrumbut doesn’t work, they decide that scrum doesn’t work.


How to approach this? Well, I think you need to advocate specific principles rather than advocating scrum. If you tell your management that you are going to be “ready to release” on a monthly basis and that they get to give feedback on what has been done at what to do next every month, I think you will likely get a better response.