Waterfall scrum
/!\ Caution: do not try it at home, you may suffer severe tunnel effect injuries /!\
This statement may seem familiar to you :
"We want to do scrum, but we are a big and serious company, we can't afford to break prod.
The best way to ensure we don't break anything is to validate each step of our software engineering by architects and managers."
The resulting process looks like that :
- one sprint to play with the foreseen technologies
- one sprint to define the architecture
- two or three sprints to actually write the code
- one sprint for QA to test the application
- one sprint for deployment
With 1-month sprints, that makes 6 months before we deliver anything to production.
It looks more like waterfall than like Scrum.
I guess the main problem is bad MVP definition.
The MVP often includes a lot of security, operability, resiliency, high availability, observability, whatever-y requirements that, while important, may not be needed for a first version.
And what leads to this bad MVP definition is:
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Lack of trust. I often hear "If we don't do it right now, [they] won't let us do it later."
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Lack of identification of roles. Who are [they] ? Could we negociate something with them ?
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Lack of communication with customer. Even when the customer is in the same company, in the next door office, we often consider (without asking them) he won't accept a feature that is not rock-solid, even if delivered as "beta version", a few months before the planned "rock-solid" delivery date.
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Lack of communication with accountable experts. The architects and various experts that have to validate your architecture just want to make sure you won't break existing features in production. They may accept that new features could be broken under some conditions, but that has to be negociated.
At the end, the missing bits are:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
- (Working software over comprehensive documentation)
Scrum is useless if we forget the bases: http://agilemanifesto.org/