Agile Forest

I know that I am not always the biggest advocate for Scrum. It isn’t that I don’t believe that using it and other Agile techniques doesn’t work. I do believe that there is considerable value in Scrum. But if you read over my other Scrum posts you will understand that I don’t think Scrum has moved with the times nor sufficiently answered the handling of production defects problem.

You can imagine my joy when earlier this year Scrum proposed a framework to allow extensions.  I gave it some time, watching from the sidelines. In May I had a look over the three proposals. Admittedly I was disappointed with the three that got through (one implies an incorrect application of feature teams, another is a renamed practice directly taken from XP), but rather than focus on the negative I remained in hope that more would come that would hit the mark.

So when Scrum.org announced recently that they were stopping the Scrum Extensions program I felt like a sad puppy. I wanted to see this work. What I did really love about David Starr’s post on the Scrum Yahoo group was the lessons learnt:

1. We confirmed the need is there.
2. The mechanism we tried to service the need was not the right one. People found it hard to consume.
3. Quality of several submissions was not sufficient.
4. People unfamiliar with Scrum found the name confusing.
5. There are many existing and potentially competing options out there. Agile Atlas looks promising, Agile Alliance resources, etc.

So we learned some things. And we’ll do better in the future. It would be cool to collaborate on this stuff instead of spooling up a new instance of a reference.

David set aside much ego and took the Scrum ethos of inspect and adapt. Arguably it is more a Lean Start-up perspective of measure, learn and pivot, but regardless I hope that Scrum.org continues to try and make something work.

Note: I thought using the term ‘retired’ or ‘deprecated’ was quite odd in reference to the suspension of Scrum Extensions. To have retired it implies a life long lived. To be deprecated shouldn’t it have been replaced by something?