No rest for the Scrum warriors

Over at Elegant Code, David Starr seems to be talking about our office...

"Scrum has finally been recognized as an excellent team management model that supports agility. It is also prone to fracturing at large scale and must be held together with more pressure at large size. It takes more than Scrum to deliver on the whole promise."

And about my team...

"Test Driven Development is a wonderfully lean practice that has genuinely matured to a standard engineering practice.

Who can argue with the constant attention to quality? Now that we can agree this is how to do business, we are simply evolving the technique rather than arguing about whether it has value.

Good stuff."

He also offers some warnings that almost applied to our teams...

"I cannot count the number of times people have represented their practices as 'Scrum-like'. I commonly ask, 'Did you start with Scrum and modify it to fit your shop?'

'No,' is the common answer. 'We read the books and picked the parts that seemed to make sense for us.' "

I laughed out loud when I read this, remembering how hard we fought off Scrumbut in the early days with my team—and more recently in our Design and Client Services teams.

However, David's warning is an important one. If we get lazy, if we start sinking back into our old processes, all of our successes could vanish in a heartbeat.

There is no rest for the Scrum warrior. One must be ever vigilant to ensure that the process machine is well oiled and humming quietly.

Thanks for the reminder, David!