Sleeping sheepdog on flickr by alexvalentine, http://www.flickr.com/photos/41006494@N00/379686989)

During his first days on the project, the Scrum Master silently observed the people and their activities on the project. He roamed the floors and worked the phones to connect with all the people working on the project. He learned that 16 people, most of them distributed across several locations (and time zones), had been working on the project for 6 months. He was told that only very little functionality has been delivered with disputable quality. He asked for a project plan and learned that none existed — everything was just in the head of one senior developer who was assigning tasks to developers on a daily basis. Moreover, the business requirements were unknown as the business analysts were still working on the requirements documents. So the senior developer told the developers to implement what he thought was right. When the Scrum Master talked to the developers, he learned that they were not doing any builds or integration tests as the appropriate infrastructure was not available. Instead, all development efforts were done on the machines of the developers.

Soon the Scrum Master felt he had gathered enough information to address the most important issues. So he met with the project sponsors to discuss a couple of issues:

• People distributed across different locations and time zones
• Dependencies on other projects and people outside the project
• No plans, no planning, no shared approach
• No team, no communication, no organization
• Bad quality results
• No value

The project sponsors were not really surprised to hear this, and the Scrum Master felt that they already knew about these issues.  They asked the Scrum Master to address these issues as soon as possible. So the Scrum Master started to introduce some changes… but he wasn’t prepared for what happened next…

to be continued.

Photo by Flickr user "johnscotthaydon" http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnhaydon/3252135212/

“Scrum does not work and I won’t even give it a try!”
— anonymous ignorant

This collection of all the ignorant statements I have come across since I have been using Scrum should help you reply to similar statements in case you will ever be confronted with them:

• “Scrum does not work because it is not fault-tolerant”
• “Sprint reviews are a waste of time! Let’s skip them!”
• “Daily Scrums are micro-management! Let’s not do this!”
• “Scrum is waterfall because you are working on stories consecutively!”

Story telling on a Sprint Burn Down chart

If you would like to know more, you may find a summary of the discussion on InfoQ: Tips to Improve Retrospectives.