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·         Part I:  How I started to use Scrum

In the last post, we looked at how I got into Agile and Scrum. Today we will take a look at how I started to break the rules.

After reading the Agile books by Ken Schwaber and obtaining my Certified ScrumMaster credential, I doubled down on Scrum at my start-up since it was working so well.  As things progressed and our business evolved, I started to bump up against the “rules” of Scrum.

As I mentioned last week in Part I, the guidance was to only use Scrum locally, not with offshore developers several time zones ahead.  I was also breaking many other “rules” most notably the sprint length, at that point the length was supposed to be one month, but I was using one week. I also changed the daily scrum to late in the day for the developers and inverted the questions to:

·         What did I do today?

·         What will I do tomorrow?

·         What do I need from you?

We also had a very small team so we dispensed with the formal sprint retrospective and did it continuously.  Then the big one hit. A business requirement came down where we had to develop thousands of Regular Expressions (RegEx) for sites that we spidered.  Each RegEx would be considered a work item in our backlog. They came with a spec from the business (what to capture) and the end result was a few RegExes as rows in a database.  We had to produce massive amounts of RegEx patterns so we hired a ton of “regex developers” or college kids in India looking for extra money.

We managed our backlog pretty easily but I struggled with applying the rules of Scrum to this process. Typically a developer would take the next highest high priority items from the backlog, work on it for a few hours and return it. They would work on two or three of these a day. I tried doing a daily scrum but it was boring for all involved. (Today I worked on RegEx. Tomorrow I will work on more RegEx. I need more Regex!) Also time boxing our iterations to a month did not make sense. We had to “release” or upload the patterns to our sider engine farm daily.

I asked Scrum experts and consulted the blogs and they all said not to change Scrum! They kept on about cross functional teams, a sprint backlog, 30 day sprints, daily scrums, etc. It was then when I decided that I would just apply the values of Agile and some features of Scrum to my process. I was labeled a “Scrum, butter” by Ken Schwaber (he even did this publically many years later at TechEd 2010.) I went back to the Agile manifesto and looked at the original four values:

·         Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

·         Working software over comprehensive documentation

·         Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

·         Responding to change over following a plan

I looked long and hard and realized that the current Scrum experts were too rigid.  Scrum boxed me in and when I had a business need that required some creativity, I was not able to use Scrum.  So I ditched Scrum and what I wound up doing was using an early form of Kanban. (More on this in the next post.)


About the Author

Steve Forte

 sits on the board of several start-ups including Triton Works. Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region and speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 (MS Press).

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