10 Years Of My Scrum Experience Stephan Schmidt

Stephan Schmidt, Vice CTO, brands4friends

Me Stephan Schmidt Vice CTO brands4friends

Stephan Schmidt - What Top Management needs to know about IT

Development is a solved problem

Time Scope

Resources ($$$)

Kanban (Lean)

Waterfall

Agile (Scrum)

Context: After 10 years of Scrum I’m moving on – kind of … .. but would introduce Scrum as a process anytime again for companies coming from waterfall or chaos

Scrum is a process to efficiently work on tasks when you have more tasks than time What should I work on? Not only software development.

Biggest down side of Scrum: Companies haven’t learned what agile means for marketing, sales, …. Big impact would be for companies to learn what agile means for them and structure themselves accordingly.

Scrum is not a product development process Do the right thing vs. doing things right

Scrum is not a portfolio process What is my company doing?

Scrum is not a release process Release, Continuous Deployments ….

Scrum says nothing about development best practices The #1 reason for it’s success as very few developers are opposed. But you need to fill this gap by yourself.

Scrum doesn’t solve time to market Biggest lever: do less

What Scrum solves

Works Scrum is one of the first processes that (easily following recipes) just work for most people

Quality Scrum increased code quality because it gave responsibility to developers

Satisfaction Overall everyone is satisfied, business, product and developers

When will I be finished answered with very little estimation overhead for projects What am I going to do in what sprint

Time Time

1. Feature

2. Feature

3. Feature

4. Feature

5. Feature

1. F

eatu

re

2. F

eatu

re

3. F

eatu

re

4. F

eatu

re

5. F

eatu

re

Parallel Serial

Scrum Helps With Focus

Self Organized Teams Cross functional teams, shared responsibility, better communication and fewer SPOFs

What Scrum doesn’t solve

Front-up

Development Start

Development

Everyone focuses here

Problems are here

Idea

Top Managementpossible impact

Reinertsen 1998

Attention of top management for a

project

Scrum Challenges

Architecture Emerging architectures?

Careers Flat hierarchies exist and self-organized teams “without” roles increase the problem

Performance Appraisal Peers to the rescue?

Sometimes there is not enough time in a sprint, sometimes there is too much The downside of time boxed sprints is 10%-20% less efficiency

X scrum masters for Y teams Scrum masters amount of work is decreasing over time, but you can’t do without a Scrum master either.

Balance Headroom Vs. Business Maintainability vs. Business Value and Pull vs. Push

Roles Scrum master =! Team Lead Scrum master =! Developer Scrum master =! Project Manager Role conflicts lead to trouble

Coordination SPOFs (DBAs etc.) no recipe Portfolio management, how to do that? Coordinating POs – often working towards their own goals Scrum of Scrums looks not efficient to me

Epics Focus, not 1 developer == 1 story Sometimes too many, too different small stories in one sprint => Focus on Epics

Self Organized Teams 1. Goal and bonus management vs.

self organized teams 2. Recruiting vs. self organized teams 3. Firing vs. self organized teams

Thanks! Questions? @codemonkeyism stephan.schmidt@brands4friends.de