Scrum is getting a real bashing at the moment as you can see here and here and I think it could do with some defending.
I was on a team that adopted Scrum and it really empowered us. After a while, pair programming, TDD and refactoring became common-place because we learnt through the iterative process that they helped us write better software. People saw the positivity in the team and the productivity improvements and it lead to a fundamental shift in the department’s culture. Now all our teams are doing some form of iterative development, BDUF has gone out of the window and practices such as TDD and pair programming are actively encouraged by the management! People at all levels can see the difference it’s made to our productivity and the reputation of our department.
So Scrum can be very successful. It would never have got this far if people weren’t doing Scrum and getting positive results, in fact agile would not have become so big if it wasn’t for the success of Scrum so we’ve got a lot to thank it for.
However, here is where I think some of the criticism sticks:
Three people on the team above (including myself) went on the Certified Scrum Master course ran by Mike Cohn who is an excellent teacher, but I’ve since been on a “Scrum Estimating and Planning” course which seemed more geared towards telling people what they wanted to hear rather than any fundamentals of agile and the problems it’s trying to solve. As James Shore suggests in his article, the quality of the teachers on the CSM courses has a huge impact.
As company’s will always prefer to send people on a course rather than create a learning culture within (especially if they’re very small, which is more forgivable) the 2 day Certified Scrum Master course will be with us for a while yet and most significantly, will continue to be the main entry point to the agile world. People will continue to adopt Scrum because they’re failing with whatever they’re currently doing and continue to fail because the Scrum trainer will teach them how to write a story or run a stand up but not address the root problems, partly because you could never go into such detail in such a small amount of time and partly because that’s not the point of the course.
“Certified Scrum Master” suggests that you’re some kind of guru (it certainly sounds a lot more impressive then my BA(h) in Business and Quality Management which took me 4 years to get a mediocre grade in). Perhaps a name change would make it more credible. If organisations were not led to believe this 2 day course is going to solve all their problems then they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.
Edit: Since writing this article (a few hours ago) I’ve had a significant change of heart and feel I’ve incorrectly laid blame at the foot of the Scrum Alliance. It’s not their fault that their Certified Scrum Master training (which is designed to teach people how to become Scrum Masters, not solve all their problems) has become so popular. However, it is a bit unfortunate that the name could so easily be misinterpreted to mean more that it is and it’s also unfortunate that organisations hook on to the most simple looking solution to their problems (and no, I haven’t been threatened by Scrum mafiosa or bottled out I’ve just changed my mind).
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