Are You Ready For Scrum

Scrum is an incremental framework around which to base agile project management which can work really effectively in a wide range of projects. Sounds great right? But are you really ready to adopt scrum methodologies?

Plenty of our colleagues peers & friends have jumped right onto the Scrum bandwagon enticed by the simplicity of it without actually knowing if they are ready to add it to their projects.

The attraction to short work cycles which produce functional software & the promise of being able to manage small periods of work with just quick daily meetings makes Scrum an appealing project to those who want to be truly agile.

So the Scrum master is in place all those involved are fully paid up members of the Scrum fan club & everyone understands how it will work & the project begins with everyone feeling positive that all will go smoothly.

But needless to say this is not always the case. What many of those adopting Scrum don t always see it that the software engineering needs to be as ready for Scrum as the humans involved. Otherwise after a few really successful sprints using Scrum you will often hit a wall where your productivity dips meaning software release dates are missed & customers get angry. This is when you decided that actually Scrum isn t that great after all.

In fact it isn t really the fault of the actual Scrum methodology but the fact that it has been adopted without the application of other technical practices such as Continuous Integration or Test Driven Development. Scrum without these means your team can work faster but this often doesn t equal increased quality. This highlights that the actual problem is that Scrum doesn t address the quality of the building of software & so if you don t apply other methods then the project will hit more problems.

So essentially no matter how good your Scrum tools are or how well thought out your project management methodologies are none of that matters if your software engineering is substandard to the needs of the task in the first place.

Interested in scrum project management: http://www.countersoft.com/products & other methodologies then Countersoft have project management software: http://www.countersoft.com which will help your projects run more simply.