Does Scrum alone = agile?

Question

I'm hearing about a lot of companies that act like they're agile but the only agile thing they do is the Scrum process. Is this enough to be considered agile? Using Scrum alone seems like the perfect excuse for a bad manager to get more meetings more often. Should I be weary of such companies?

Answer 1

Agile is a big, vague concept. Lots of things are Agile.

Scrum is a specific set of techniques for doing sprints and releases. It's agile because it fits the Agile Manifesto.

There are lots of other specific Agile techniques (all of the xDD's, for example.)

When in doubt, compare the companies actual practices against the Agile Manifesto.

Answer 2

"I'm hearing about a lot of companies that act like they're agile but the only agile thing > they do is the Scrum process. Is this enough to be considered agile"

Short answer - yes. In my opinion anyway :-)

Of course - they have to be actually doing Scrum - rather than just sticking the name on the wall. There's a lot more to Scrum than daily stand-ups... and if that's all they're doing they're not doing it right.

Done correctly Scrum forces companies to identify the bottlenecks in how the organisation is running. By setting up regular timeboxed sprints, getting a decent feedback loop, and splitting responsibility across product owner and team appropriately you actually get useful baseline information on how to improve your process.

The organisation has to listen to that feedback - and act on it.

It's certainly not the only way to do agile. It might not even be the best way to introduce agile into an organisation. I'm more of an XP fan myself - and find that the extra practices provide a useful framework for kick-starting those process improvements.

That said - for many organisations - the biggest problem is bad split of responsibilities & the complete lack of a sane and rapid feedback loop. Scrum fixes that out of the gate.

Meetings are a very small part of that :-)

Answer 3

Bad managers will be outed by the transparency that Scrum promotes. Companies truly embracing Scrum are definitely worth a look.

Answer 4

Using SCRUM alone is not necessarily an excuse to get more meetings. Being able to track the work that's done every day and make decisions on how to modify (by cutting or rebalancing work) the rest of the sprint is quite useful on it's own and sound agile to me. :-)

Of course, if you don't have the other components of the agile process, you will have harder time to measure the success of your work, so you might think you are on track with the sprint, but in fact be nowhere near the point you should be at to deliver quality product on schedule.

Update: You shouldn't dismiss such company on that premise alone. HOwever, during the interview, you should use the chance to understand why they are using only SCRUM. If it's a matter of not having people to champion things like TDD or CI, than it might be a good fit for you, if you are willing to become the technical lead. If it's because they dismiss these processes as "overhead" or "stupid" or "unnecessary", then you should be wary of the company.

Answer 5

It's not possible to tell whether a team is agile just because somebody says that they're doing scrum.

There are good and bad scrum implementations but they key things about agile are:

• the ability of the project and team to think flexibly
• how self-organising the team is (do they have a control freak "architect" or manager? or is there a considerable amount of consensus decision making?)

It's all too easy to conform to the minimum requirements of what a team needs to do to be doing scrum without being truly agile. Those minimum requirements are only there to bring about a certain attitude and way of working.

It's possible for decision-making in a project to be ridgidly inflexible and controlled top-down and yet conform to the minimum requirements of scrum. Sadly, when I look for contracting engagements, I find the scrum-in-name only implementations outnumber the real thing by a considerable margin.

Personally, I'd choose to implement extreme programming within scrum. (In fact, Jeff Sutherland says he's never seen a top productivity scrum team that didn't do the XP practices.) However, I'm pretty confident that people could implement XP really badly too... ;-) It really comes down to the attitude in the team.

Answer 6

I've noticed that just using Scrum meetings alone is a pretty clear sign that the company has not correctly implemented Agile concepts.

Think about how easy Scrum meetings are, just fire up Outlook and give everyone a daily 15 minute meeting. But, slicing everything up into quick iterations and making sure new functionally is rapidly tested by end users takes a lot more work.

I'd guess, that most managers stop reading right after the Scrum part and they lose interest. But, their daily meeting requests live on forever.

Answer 7

Scrum is a project management methodology, first and foremost. Yes, if you are doing Scrum, you are probably beginning to think more about being agile, and delivering value to your customer. But it does not necessarily make you agile. For starters, Scrum doesn't talk about HOW you do software development. This is where things like XP come in - other methodologies and ideas that force you to review and change your working practices in order to become more efficient and effective.

So, rather than asking "do you do Scrum / XP / whatever" I would ask these companies about their overall processes and take a holistic view. Is the company focussing on delivery of maximum business value and driven by an ethos of continuous improvement? If so, then they are probably a lot more agile than one that says it does Scrum.

Answer 8

Agile != scrum.

Agile is about readyness for changes.

Agile is many times presented as an umbrella, set of different techniques, methods, to work in an environment supporting a change. Scrum is for project management, for development techniques there is xp, for better requirement process you can use BDD, for test TDD.

Starting with scrum is the first step on your agility way. Consider other techniques as well. It will take time, but there are real benefits. And there is nothing better than common understanding and good team spirit. Achieve that as the first.

Answer 9

The Agile manifesto is really a philosophy that pertains to a better ways of working. Scrum is an agile methodology, so yes a company using Scrum would typically be considered agile.

It is however entirely possible to forget the Agile philosophy when trying to implement Scrum. It can be easy to get caught up in the pursuit of the perfect scrum process and neglect the individuals and their interactions.

You should be weary of the companies that neglect individuals and interactions, and instead blindly favour strict process and tools. However, this holds true regardless of their stated methodology.

Answer 10

scrum alone is equal to agile is totally a misconception. Agile is the umbrella under which there are several methods like scrum master, kanban, lean, XP. Now you say how can a part of the umbrella fullfil the idea of an umbrella as a whole. Therefore, scrum is a part of agile.

Answer 11

Organization practicing only Scrum would most likely be seeing gains on software management and project visibility front. However, they are most likely not achieving a higher engineering quality and throughput potential by not incorporating XP principles like Unit Testing, Continuous Integration, Pair Programming etc., leaving their end of Sprint product NOT "Potentially Shippable".

Answer 12

Scrum provides you with a framework to fix/improve your development process. It should be considered as a starting point to "jelled team" and more productive team. Most likely you will go beyond standard Scrum practices soon, but as a starting point it has some attractive properties:

1. It is very easy to understand
2. It can be applied to almost any project and team
3. There are quite many people who make money and help companies with Scrum adoption

Also there it is really not so important to know whether Scrum = agile. It is better to focus on better productivity and do not bother yourself with such questions.

Answer 13

Yeah, I'd agree with some of the sentiment here. Be Agile is following the manifesto and assuring that you have the right alignment of priorities. SCRUM is just another variant with specific pieces written down. It is, if anything a management "tool".

With that said, remember, the tools are secondary, your people are your priority. Don't over-focus on the management style, focus instead of the people and the product.

Answer 14

People fall victim to their subjective perspectives. What I think Agile and Scrum is, another person may think somewhat differently. Luckily we have a set of guidelines in the Agile manifesto and principles and Scrum values but often companies end up becoming fixated on following the process instead of understanding it and its goals.

Agile Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Scrum values

You can learn a lot about a company that uses Scrum by asking them about the values and how they adhere to them. This can give you an idea if the process of Scrum is just enforced without really considering the values that are linked to it.

All work performed in Scrum needs a set of values as the foundation for the team's processes and interactions. And by embracing these five values, the team makes them even more instrumental to its health and success. - See more at: https://www.scrumalliance.org/why-scrum/core-scrum-values-roles#sthash.qsmCTxdU.dpuf

• Focus
• Courage
• Openness
• Commitment
• Respect

Goal

The goal is to release quality software at the end of each iteration.

With the right influence, the values within the company can change. Unfortunately people are unpredictable so companies can slide back into bad habits when other changes are introduced. This is what makes software more challenging and exciting. It's finding ways to create the balance within the forces between technology and product.

Red flags

• If a company is more focused on the process instead of the goal.
• If you have to jump through all sorts of hoops and procedures to sign off the smallest change.
• The company doesn't have to get the process 100% right but if they are not continuously adapting and improving to reach their goal, instead of just following a process then they probably end up with a "Half-Arsed" implementation of Agile:

We have heard about new ways of developing software by paying consultants and reading Gartner reports. Through this we have been told to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools and we have mandatory processes and tools to control how those individuals (we prefer the term ‘resources’) interact
• Working software over comprehensive documentation as long as that software is comprehensively documented
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation within the boundaries of strict contracts, of course, and subject to rigorous change control
• Responding to change over following a plan provided a detailed plan is in place to respond to the change, and it is followed precisely

That is, while the items on the left sound nice in theory, we’re an enterprise company, and there’s no way we’re letting go of the items on the right.

Compliance

Some companies may have heavy compliance procedures in place that hinders being Agile. This can include governance and other regulations that cannot be escaped. This can impact the Agile methodology by making it feel more cumbersome and heavy but it doesn't mean that those processes cannot be streamlined to be more accommodating.