The Indiepinion

I found a nice presentation on Boris Gloger’s homepage about the “professionalization” of the Games Industry by adopting Scrum:

I specifically liked page 32 “Lack of Visibility” and the following. I can relate to that. He goes on to say that Management’s typical reaction to a slowdown of production is to improve … management itself. This leads to a centralistic, hierarchical, dominant, slow, process driven, non agile company.

I would just like to add that – as sad as it may be – you can still be exactly that company while at the same time doing Scrum. How so?

If … (long sentence warning – keep your concentration) … if your company puts the word out at one point that from now on you’re using Scrum because that’s what others are doing successfully and that you’ll be subdivided into specialized teams and you’ll have daily meetings to improve communication but doesn’t even care to explain how this is going to help your problems or improve how exactly, nor train and coach the developers who are supposed to be living and breathing Scrum how to do just that while at the same time neglecting important parts of Scrum (for example: Sprint Retrospectives) and getting others totally wrong (ScrumMaster as merely keeper of the minutes, reporting back to Management) while giving orders from above and trying to stay “in control” (whatever that means) – then that can only mean one thing: ScrumButt!

At some point i did the Nokia Test for Scrum (PDF) with the information that was visible to me – certainly not applicable to the whole company but needless to say, some parts were even worse off – and with much goodwill the score i got was a mere 3 out of 10. At that time i’d given it just a 2 because we didn’t even do iterations anymore for a short time. Reason? We finished the product and were now only testing and bugfixing which apparently isn’t plannable anyway so you can just drop the iterations altogether, right? That makes a couple more hours each Sprint for managers to catch up because you don’t have to do a Sprint Planning meeting.

In that regard i can understand where the lack of buy-in from Game Developers to Scrum is coming from. My point is, if you take it out on Scrum because what you’re doing carries the name “Scrum” and you just don’t like it – take 10 minutes and do the Nokia Test for Scrum (still the same PDF – i’m giving you a second chance, take it!).

If you don’t score at least a 6 or 7, your problem isn’t Scrum – it’s your management!

PS: with that last sentence “your problem isn’t Scrum – it’s your management!” i was tempted to add some “maybe”s and “probably”s there. I didn’t, on purpose. I want to make a point. I know some people just don’t like Scrum, they do exist and i can understand and respect that. But i’m a firm believer that those who don’t like Scrum, well most of them apparently haven’t experienced the “good Scrum”, given the traces of information they leave in their blog posts and comments.