Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Am I Doing Scrum? - Nokia's Benchmark for Scrum Adoption

Dr. Jeff Sutherland, and Agile Manifesto signatory, has posted an excellent interview, "Scrum and Not-Scrum". As part of this interview, he advocates eight questions that Nokia uses to determine if their teams have adopted Scrum. Jeff presents this as a boolean test. If the team can answer "yes" to all eight of these questions, they are doing Scrum. If any question gets a "no," then they have not fully adopted Scrum. Here are the questions:

First Tier:

  • Are you doing iterative development?
    • Do you have a fixed iterations lasting less than six weeks?
  • At the end of the iteration, do you have working software?
  • Can the team effectively start work on an iteration without a detailed specification?
  • Is testing part of the increment?

Second Tier:
  • Do you have a product owner?
  • Does the product owner have a prioritized, estimated product backlog?
  • When the team is developing, do they have a burndown chart?
    • Can you calculate the team's velocity?
  • Is the team self-organizing?
    • In other words, does the team choose, assign, and map the fastest possible way to deliver the work?
    • The project manager cannot interfere with the team during an iteration.

I highly recommend watching this interview. It is only about 20 minutes long, and it is packed with good information including a summary of Google's boiled frog adoption of Scrum on the AdWords project.

Jeff also reminds us that Scrum will not solve your organizational problems, but it will make them painfully obvious.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice post. There's a tendency for some to associate agile with no methodology at all. The objective criteria help sort out if you are following Scrum without getting into an argument.