The future of scrum

Lately I've heard rumors about SCRUM starting to define the developer role inside the scrum team. Yesterday in the 3rd Israeli scrum forum, those rumors were confirmed when Danko announced that the scrum alliance is contemplating adding a Scrum Developer certification course. When I asked for details, he said that its just the beginning, but the Scrum Alliance is now starting to discuss the various engineering practices and decide which of those to adopt as inherent parts of SCRUM.

Its about time.

A good Development process

One of the things that always bothered me about SCRUM is the idea that one can define a DEVELOPMENT process without actually going into how software is developed. This led me to describe SCRUM as a management process which is very suitable for managing software development projects, and not as a full development process. Therefore when I'm consulting companies trying to adopt scrum I always make it a point to introduce to them some of the engineering practices included in the XP process (mainly TDD, CI, Pair programming and refactoring). Others (Dave Rooney, Martin Fowler, Ron Jeffries and more) also expressed their concerns about SCRUM not being enough and in order to sustain the benefits and become a hyper-productive team one must adopt some engineering practices to enhance the SCRUM process.

Are XP and SCRUM merging?

Although it is very early in the process, I do believe that we are finally starting to witness one of the most expected moves in the agile community, the evolving of the SCRUM and XP methodologies into a unified methodology that will encompass all aspects of software development. I'm guessing that is only natural following the joining of key figures of the XP community to the Scrum alliance.

The birth of ScrumP

For me there was never a place for two sisters methodologies in the software world. In fact most of the places I've seen have chosen to a to develop using an XP SCRUM hybrid methodology. In those places which did not do so, it was mainly because they felt it to be too risky to take it all at once, and thought it better to focus on specific aspects of the process to begin with adding more as they get better.

So lets welcome the newborn baby and help him make his first steps in the world. I hope that when he grows up he will help us all do a better job.

Posted in: Engineering Practices,Scrum,XP