Do you notice that everyone uses the words 'agile' and 'scrum' interchangeably around the office? Does daily scrum feel like a regular old status meeting? Is it just you hearing everyone around you saying that your organisation is "doing" agile but not seeing any results? There might be a lack of understanding about what scrum and agile really are, how they work, and how they differ from traditional techniques of project management.
What Is Scrum?
Scrum is an Agile framework to help teams endeavour things within a short time frame called sprints. The Scrum teams make a commitment to delivering work at the end of each sprint, yet maintain a structure of practices and teams to help them achieve this cadence. The Scrum development framework takes Agile principles further by giving the teams structure to live by those Agile principles in practice. Scrum is an agile framework that is well known and documented, and is one that teams can adopt with little disruption.Are you a professional who is aspiring to be a Certified ScrumMaster? Then check out the Scrum methodology Project Management Course of the British academy for training and development now.
Advantages of using the scrum methodology
Scrum provides the mechanism for teams to ship the software on time. Instead of communicating with stakeholders on the progress, the team demonstrates the progress; they can see it in action. Once software is shipped, customers start using it. The more they use it, the more helpful data that comes back to help derive further direction for future versions and outgrowth. Moreover, Scrum teams are usually healthier, with lesser risks for burnout and churn compared to others. This is because Scrum focuses on sprint practices like planning, retrospectives, etc., on preparing teammates for success.
Disadvantages of using the scrum methodology
Scrum is an all in approach. You get success by bringing in new roles, like scrum masters, and restructuring everybody's schedules around the essential meeting cadence. A lot of teams do not have the resources to hire new team members or the time for new meetings. When teams do not go all in, they usually do not realize any of the benefits of Scrum. Moreover, just not every team could produce at such a high cadence. Many teams increase the length of their sprints to compensate for failing quality. Right back to the waterfall we go!
What is Agile?
Agility is a motto in project management for a process of logic, rule, and principle by which active software teams can interact with changes. Agile teams will place more value on people and customer dealings rather than processes and tools; towards the delivery of working software rather than following documentation, personal collaboration prefers to negotiate a contract, and responding is more important than following a plan. All these belonged together to the Agile Manifesto, and there are about 12 principles behind the manifesto.
The best way to grasp agile would be by contrasting it with an alternative approach, waterfall. Here, the scope of a product is defined, whereas time and resource allocations are flexible. Further, any resource demand will be met by just adding a few programmers to work in the schedules already planned for the delivery of the product.
Agile, however, keeps the resources and the time limits fixed; the course of the product is flexible. This is how agile teams declare- that they are today committed towards delivering software management at a stipulated time along with the team. What they deliver is an outcome from their journey that is flexible about what they learned the customer actually wants and what they can build in the time frame provided. Be part of the agile management course of The British Academy for training and development.
Benefits of using agile
Agile teams vigorously promote the reason behind their undertaking as well as clarity about its execution. Agile values assist teams in segmenting tremendous and daunting goals into manageable pieces of work that they can consistently deliver on. Countless anecdotes abound in which agile software developers and their small teams succeed against much larger competitors adhering to waterfall delivery. This much to the advantage of agile teams along the lines of the agile industrial complex, whereby resources such as materials and tools abound for those wanting to learn agile, with an army of consultants waiting to assist with implementation.
Disadvantages of using agile
Following agile principles can lead you to places you never thought you'd go. Agile enables teams to make adjustments based on market and customer input. In pursuit of these ideals, you may find that your team has built something completely different than what you set out to do. The next feeling may be unsettling, and you might even experience an angst of directionlessness as you pursue other paths and heed customer feedback in different directions. Because of these divergent results, not all teams and companies can work in an agile manner. But, the teams that dare-to cross these hurdles often find themselves delivering a better product to their customers at the end of the day.
What's the difference between Agile and Scrum?
It is one of the greatest misconceptions to consider Scrum synonymous with Agile. Agile is an umbrella term for an entire family of approaches that share common values and principles. Scrum is an Agile framework with a great deal of currency, providing guidance on organising work to maximise the value of the end user.
Scrum applies at the level of a development team focused on a product, while Agile is one that spreads throughout the organisation, with leadership and culture being prime among the areas impacted.
While organisations might run Scrum in conjunction with other Agile principles and practice, the fact remains that Scrum appears deceptively easy to implement on the outside, and yet the real hard work is on an individual and organisational level to reap the benefits promised by Agile.
A brief Introductory History of Agile and Scrum
At the beginning, agile was an unnamed term. It first emerged because of that never ending complex approach that it took to design and develop any software; it sometimes even took years to deliver a product. Several methods evolved; scrum, so to speak, was the way to shorten time to market, i.e., bring to the customer more value in less time. Yet there was something in terms of gaps left into the whole history of agile.
The summarised version is: In February 2001, 17 people from different software-building communities gathered together at a ski resort in the mountains of Utah to talk about how software development would keep pace with the changing needs of users. That summit ended up not producing yet another framework within which to design software developments; it ended up instead coining a term for a collection of values and principles that encapsulated what these developers really sought to think of people as the most important asset in the development process.
Agile did not begin on such snowy peaks, nor did it rest there in many ways, agile will always be what it is at present, an evolving collection of beliefs that has spawned a myriad of frameworks and methodologies for a single minded purpose making the world of work better.
How is agile different from traditional project management approaches?
Traditionally, we have only had a waterfall approach to creating products. The requirements are defined at the outset; budget is allocated on a per project basis. Value goes to the end-user at the end of the project. Therefore, by the time a version of the product is finished, it could be months or years after when these requirements were probably never really guarded. Today, a great deal of competition comes to market, trying to do your work with more speed and even better. Customers might end up leaving you to competitors that will offer the same services or products but respond to their users' immediate needs.
The problem with the waterfall approach is its strength with fixed budget, scope, and schedule. Project completion is near, and development teams are forced into death marches where they can work crazy hours, giving rise to significant burnout amongst the employees. They have received little to no feedback from the end user, and you now have a product that no longer meets the current user needs.
What they call a huge change in the requirements means an entire restart of the waterfall process or dropping the project in its entirety. These will lead to massive waste of time and money apart from putting a severe dent on the morale of your employees, who may have invested a great deal of their belief in the success of the project they just completed.