Ken Schwaber on the Scrum Framework

Lou Paglia — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:05:26 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been taking a serious look at the agile methodology and looking at whether we would benefit from employing it in a more purist manner. It is not completely new to us but any agile purist out there would say using a hybrid product development framework is well, a hybrid and doesn’t count. Like using day old used coffee grinds. So doing a bit more research on the Scrum framework and the agile methodology, and as I get more immersed into the agile practice in a pure sense, the more interesting it becomes.

One of my colleagues, Daniel Bullington, sent a Google Video on a talk that Ken Schwaber, co-inventor of SCRUM, gave back in 2006. The video is below but here is a classic excerpt about the value of SCRUM that Ken gave in the talk:

If you have a team of outstanding engineers that are using excellent engineering tools, have engineering practices down pat, understand the business domain and aren’t interrupted to have all the resources they need, then you can use Scrum. While it’s true that people like that can build an increment of software each iteration. That’s good.

However, Scrum works with idiots. You can take a group of idiots, that maybe didn’t even go to school, don’t understand computer science, don’t understand software engineering techniques, hate each other, don’t understand the business domains, have lousy engineering tools and uniformly, they will produce “crap” every increment. This is good!

You want to know where you are at the end of every iteration.

Classic!

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Ken Schwaber on the Scrum Framework