5 not-so-Agile practices with SCRUM
July 21st, 2008
I have come across several articles on the best practices for Agile/SCRUM.
I read this somewhere and really liked it:
There is not and never will be a list of “Scrum Best Practices” because team and project context trump all other considerations.
Here are 5 practices that may be considered as “not-so-agile” by purists. But, making the following changes to our Agile/SCRUM process actually made us a very effective Agile Organization..!
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Dedicated Testers & Writer on the SCRUM Team:
This could be against the “No specialization” or “No fixed Roles” Agile principle.
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Minispecs:
This could be against “use the working code as documentation”. We use MiniSpecs very effectively to document key requirements and design/implementation decisions in a concise manner.
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Our SCRUM Master is our Sr. Director/Manager:
This is self-explanatory. Our Manager is actually a certified SCRUM Master with two decades of development experience. He demonstrates great balance.
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Team members shared across teams:
We have a UI specialist and an Architect/Developer shared across 2 teams. I guess it might make sense to share the UI specialist. The Architect/Developer shared across teams has helped us immensely improve communication and to effectively sort out integration issues across the products in our Product Suite.
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Multiple backlogs for the same product suite:
Okay. This one might be up for debate. Our Product suite consists of at least 5 products that have their own SCRUM Teams. There is also a Product Owner with individual Product backlog for each of these products. Also, there is a common backlog for infrastructure/common functionality.
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