Scrum, the experimentation framework

December 19, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Due to its exterior simplicity lately Scrum has become the most popular Agile method. What can be simpler, than few artifacts roles and procedure? The unfortunate consequence of this exterior simplicity is that often people try adopting the method without a deep thought and proper guidance. Some coaches consider it so big problem, that declare the fall of agile (I don’t think so).

One of the particularly interesting aspects that is missing from the simple method description is that Scrum is a powerful experimentation framework. The cadence of short iterations and mandatory reflection moments allows a team to try significant amount of improvements in a rather short period of time. You think making acceptance tests a mandatory part of all the requirements is useful? – Try it for a sprint or two and see if it works for you. Arguments about the effectiveness and social aspects of pair programming and colocation seem to be going forever? – Move the tables together and try pairing for a sprint. Some practices such as Test Driven Development might need some more time for a real try, but even in these cases them it is usually possible to figure out the required experiment length in advance. Scrum applied with a decent amount of rigor forces participants to focus on the goals and evaluation criteria of the potential improvements and arms the team with the regularly applied improvement cycle.

Large effect of the small improvements

Most of the improvements a team tries are often quite small. The trick is that sprint after sprint these small improvements add up to a significant advantage. Famous Toyota Production System that is heavily based on the same experimentation idea allows the company to make over 700000 (seven hundreds thousands!) improvements per average year and over the decades it contributed very well to making the Toyota the biggest automaker in the world.

Agile and Scrum are no silver bullet. We still need to think and the best thing Scrum can provide us with is the thinking tools that help framing wishes with the technical and time boundaries of the real world. Scrum helps us to transform some of the wishful thinking into short knowledge generating experiments.

Your experience

What about your team? How often do you try new things and how carefully do you frame these experiments?

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