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.

Why Are You Asking Me This Question?

Any developer that's been around this industry for any length of time has found himself in a conversation like this one:

Manager: Hey, Mr. Developer, TheBusiness has decided that we need to develop a product to do XYZ. How long will that take?
Developer: Hrm... I'm not sure. What are the details of XYZ?
Mgr: The details aren't important. I just need an estimate
Dev: Well... something like 8 weeks.
Mgr: Okay, well how much longer until you finish the thing you're working on?
Dev: Around 4 weeks
Mgr: Okay. Thanks.

[10 weeks later]

Mgr: So, Dev, I'm looking forward to having this XYZ product. We've already sold it to 50 customers and they're excited to be getting it in two weeks.
Dev: WHAT?!?!?!

This is not a fun series of conversations. The breakdowns in communication should be obvious. The manager (unknowingly) expected way too much precision from the developer's estimate, and the developer gave it without nearly enough qualifying statements pointing out that it's a WAG.

So, how can this be fixed? Many developers that I know say, just don't provide the estimate. While most of us could get away with that, it doesn't necessarily help the conversation. I prefer to answer with, "Why are you asking me this question?" This is a question that I learned to ask by watching a former team lead, Glenn Burnside. Whenever a salesperson or manager would ask the team a question like, "How difficult would it be to...," Glenn's response was always the same - he would ask this question. This always resulted in a conversation that fleshed out a more detailed question (or questions) and much better, more precise answers.

The hardest part of software development is interacting with those objects that have a pulse - not those that have a system clock.