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Scrum pattern

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A scrum pattern defines a specific problem an IT team development may encounter throughout the life-cycle of an application. Each pattern is created based on the Root cause analysis of project's failure or success:

  • across multiple IT projects,
  • ranging from small to large projects,

which guaranties a relevance of a pattern.

For instance, the Standish Group gathers a large amount of IT data on real-life IT failures since 1985 [1], and IBM has established the Top 7 factors of project failures[2]

Also based on extended analysis, Project Management's institutes, companies and individuals are regularly gather to provide empirical solutions. This is the case of Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum, who travels around the world to collect information whether on IT projects or on manufacturing industry, re-adjusts his viewpoint and propagates his knowledge though Summits, articles, training, workshops or free events.

Scrum patterns are useful to:

  • Help identify and define a recurring problems within your team and project,
  • Suggest solutions that were proven to work for other teams, and provide a larger view on the scope of the solutions.
  • Refer to related patterns the team/ project may face.

By formalizing a problem and providing a solution that has been tested across multiple organizations, a team could significantly increase/optimize its performance, Self-esteem and moral, both as individuals, and as a self-organized team with no micromanagement nor team leader, but rather a ScrumMaster who has a Servant leadership and no people management responsibilities.

History

Patterns of IT project failures has been identified before the creation of Scrum. By formalizing empirical experiences into best practices to form the Scrum framework, this movement has been accelerated, particularly after October 2011 when Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released "The Scrum Guide, The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game" [3] . It is a simplified version of the previous guides, so that only the core Scrum is present. Since this version, Scrum was made open source the community (but the owners remains Jess and Ken). As a result, additional advices, improvements and initiatives was launched, and various communities have further developed scrum patterns.

"Scrum pattern" refers to both Scrum (development) that is an agile software development and also to software design pattern. Similarly to Software design pattern, we could find Scrum anti-pattern, which gathers a list of all bad practices that guaranties either the failure of a projects or the generation of many frustrations.

Usage

When you want to move toward agility either on a new project or on an existing one, a scrum pattern helps identify and communicate the changes needed to the development team and the management. Instead of picking-up randomly any Scrum artifact and implement it, the usage of Lean software development, specifically the Kaizen (i.e. in Japanese "philosophy of improvement"), one could quickly increase a team's velocity in a structured manner with low efforts but high Return on investment. With this one single improvement wisely identified would solve the majority of your problems. This is also known as the 20/80 ratio or Pareto principle largely used in manufacturing industry and statistics. In our case, 20% of the effort spent on the improvements would solve 80% of our problems, which could be enough to consider spending our remaining 80% of energy in building a valuable product for the customer.

Example of Scrum patterns and usage

List of Scrum Patterns (non exhaustive)

Here are list of free initiatives

Name of a given scrum pattern may vary from one initiative to another, but the problem they solve remain the same.

Problem to solve: Multitasking that reduces productivity, introduces errors and frustrations

Problem: Many studies[4] [5] [6] [7] [8], literature[9] , articles[10] [11] [12] and worldwide consulting firms[13], including recent ones from Louisiana State University psychology Professor Emily Elliott[14] stresses the fact that multitasking of any kind reduces the productivity and/or increases rate of errors, thus generates unnecessary frustrations.

It has been estimated that $650 billion[15] a year is wasted in US businesses due to multitasking.

Solution: ScrumPlop addresses this issue using the "first-things-first" Scrum pattern, when the context of the problem is summarized, and references and studies that justifies the solution are given.

References

  1. ^ "The Standish Group".
  2. ^ Joseph, Gulla. "Seven Reasons IT Projects Fail - Avoiding these pitfalls will help ensure success". IBM Systems Mag. Retrieved February 2012. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  3. ^ "The Scrum Guide. The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game" (PDF). http://www.scrum.org. p. 1. Retrieved October 2011. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); External link in |publisher= (help)
  4. ^ Elliott, Emily (18 September 2012). "Louisiana State University psychology professor". ITWorld. Louisiana State University. Retrieved 18 September 2012.
  5. ^ Robert Rogers; Stephen Monsell (1995). "The costs of a predictable switch between simple cognitive tasks". Journal of Experimental Psychology. p. 124, 207-231.
  6. ^ Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching. Human Perception and Performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2001. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  7. ^ "How Employers Can Make Us Stop Multitasking". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved May 17, 2012.
  8. ^ "Multitasking Gets You There Later". infoQ. 2010. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  9. ^ Crenshaw, Dave (2008). The myth of multitasking : how doing it all gets nothing done (1st ed. ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 144. ISBN 978-0470372258. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  10. ^ RICHTEL, Matt (APRIL 20, 2011). The New York Times Blog http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/message-to-executives-stop-multitasking/. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
  11. ^ Cherry, Kendra. "The Cognitive Costs of Multitasking". about.com : Cognitive Psychology.
  12. ^ "Multitasking kills productivity and that's bad for new business".
  13. ^ Derek Dean; Caroline Webb (January 2011). "Recovering from information overload". McKinsey Quarterly. McKinsey.
  14. ^ Elliott, Emily (18 September 2012). "Louisiana State University psychology professor". ITWorld. Louisiana State University. Retrieved 18 September 2012.
  15. ^ RICHTEL, Matt (14). The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/technology/14email.html. Retrieved June 14, 2008. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help); Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)



Further reading

Soft skills to go beyond Scrum patterns and further increase team's efficiency

Scrum Patterns, by design, are based on empirical facts and measures. To really understand what is behind the scene, soft skills have to be developed and a great help will come from the knowledge of complementary and powerful disciplines such as (and not limited to):

Many of the Scrum artifacts are empirical answers some bias, and when knowing the most important ones, it is easier to put in place artifacts such as the Scrum ones to move toward the success of an IT project.

For instance "Timeboxing" is an answer to the Optimism bias, that is one of the reason why the Mantra of Agile software development and Lean software development is "Think big, act small, fail fast; learn rapidly" . However, some bias could be sometimes beneficial. Indeed, because a bias is a very basic instinctive but wrong answer to complex situation, but could leads by chance to good outcome.

Other Scrum topics


Videos

  • Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell, by Henrik Kniberg



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