Colleague Sander van Laarhoven, Front-end Developer at Oliver IT, talks about his experiences with working according to the Agile/Scrum method and the development that companies that apply this method have gone through. A method that works provided it is embraced by the entire organization and the important pillars within Agile/Scrum are properly applied.
From the waterfall method to Agile/Scrum
As a software developer, you have always been used to getting a book in which everything the business wants to get from oats to groats is worked out for you. Sometimes every pixel in the screen has already been put in place by a designer and leaves nothing to the imagination. "Go make it" is the message. All projects used to be picked up according to this waterfall method. Then there's someone on the team who's heard that there's another way, too: Agile/Scrum. With that, all the problems of the waterfall method are a thing of the past. The first time Scrum. For me, that was where a period of both successful and less successful experiences with this method began.
After ten years and more than ten projects with Scrum, I have seen a lot of improvements around this methodology. But unfortunately, I have also seen a lot of well-intentioned but wrong implementations of Scrum methodologies. I once started as a consultant/developer at a large client and experienced the transition from waterfall to Agile/Scrum completely. First as a team member and later as a Scrum master. After this time, I carried out a dozen projects at different companies according to Scrum. I have noticed that each company is different and has its own challenges that play a role.
Scrum implementation within an organisation
When a company introduces the Scrum methodology it is quite a change. What you often see is that the whole company does not switch and commit to it. Only the development teams of the IT department are then committed to Scrum and other departments are not or only indirectly involved. This results in a crooked way of working in which the upper part of the organization works according to the waterfall and PRINCE2 methods and the lower part with Agile/Scrum. In consultancy we also call this 'Waterscrum'. That takes away a lot of advantages of the methodology and is therefore far from optimal.
The organization as a whole, where I worked at the time, was not really familiar with the methodology, but the development team was keen to try it. We started by working in sprints and delivering stories from a large functional design (FO). This was before the time of Jira and Pivotaltracker and we were forced to use a physical scrub board. This went surprisingly well because we worked in a fixed space and not from a distance. What followed were stand-ups next to the scrumbboard and then moving the notes. Post-it's that were moved more often fell off but it felt good to slowly move all those notes to the other side of the board.