Jens Östergaard on Scrum

Today I listened to a presentation about "Scrum for Managers" from Jens Östergaard. He's a big, friendly Dane who grew up in Sweden, and now lives in the UK. I first met Jens at XP2003 in Genoa, when he had just run his first successful Scrum project. These days he spends his time flying around the world, teaching Scrum courses and coaching Scrum Masters. (He'll be doing 2 more CSM courses in Göteborg in the next 6 months, and speaking at Scandinavian Developer Conference).

One thing I noticed about his talk was that most things about Scrum hardly seem to have changed at all. Jens was largely using the same language and examples that are in the original books. The other thing that struck me was that Jens said nothing about the technical practices that are needed to make agile development work. In my world, you can't possibly hope to reliably deliver working software every sprint/iteration if you havn't got basic practices like continuous integration and automated testing in place. I asked Jens about this afterwards, and he said it was deliberate. Scrum is a project management framework that can be applied to virtually any field, not just software development. Therefore he didn't want to talk about software specific practices.

When I first heard Ken Schwaber talk about Scrum (keynote at XP2002) I'm farily sure he included the XP developer practices. I can't find my notes from that speech, but I remember him being very firey and enthusiastic and encouraging us to go out and convert the world to Scrum and XP (the word agile wasn't invented then).

Scrum has been hugely successful since then. Today we had a room full of project managers and line managers who all knew something about Scrum, many of whom are using it daily in their organizations. Scrum is relatively easy to understand and get going with at the project level, and has this CSM training course that thousands of people have been on. These are not bad things.

I do think that dropping the XP development practices entirely from the description of Scrum is unhelpful. I chatted with several people who are having difficulty getting Scrum to work in their organizations, and I think lack of developer practices, particularly automated testing, is compounding their problems. I think a talk given to software managers needs to say something about how developers might need coaching and training in new practices if they are going to succeed with Scrum.