Scrum and Agile software development


Linux-SWAT

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Hi,

for those of you having some experience with this kind of project management methods, I'd be interested in having some feedback about it from you.
Do you like it, did you see successful or failed attempts, improvements over traditional, if no method at all etc. ?
 
I much preferred working in a sort of scrum team over using traditional waterfall methods. It probably helped that our team lead was one of us, so basically if we didn't feel something was worth doing he'd push back. We had it set up so that our scrum master was basically a full time developer, just also manned the stand ups where we say what we did the day before and plan for the day ahead.

Just having a daily report of what I'd been doing made me much more productive, and planning only a day ahead at a time made us much more flexible. Of course, we weren't really planning only a day ahead; we ran two week cycles with expected deliverables agreed between scrum master and team leader, which primarily influenced where things were put on the board; higher priority things went towards the top.

Also, every week we'd have a retrospective meeting, where we could flag up anything we thought could be improved about the way we worked, as well as noting anything we thought had gone well. Those meetings became shorter as the team settled down to a good way of working, which basically meant getting out to the pub earlier on a friday evening.
 
I've been working with many different methodologies all more or less Agile for the last 10 years.

First of all, and this can't be stressed enough: the methodology needs to be adapted to your project and your team. Generally speaking, there are some good concepts in Agile and the various methodologies, but there's a tendency to force SCRUM everywhere, and it's not necessarily the best solution.

It's difficult to give more advice without knowing more about the situation, but if you feel like there are problems with the work organisation or room for improvement, looking at various Agile methodologies can be helpful.
 
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