Scrum Does Not Tell You How To Build Stuff

There have been some respected leaders in the industry that evidently just don’t get what Scrum is meant to provide and, more importantly, what it’s not.

Scrum does not tell you that you have to use TDD, BDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, OOP, etc. Scrum also does not tell you that you have to use User Stories that are estimated with the Fibonacci-ish scale. It doesn’t tell you how and if to do exploratory testing, load testing, performance testing, acceptance testing, or anything else.

Why? Because it wasn’t meant to. Are all of the things I mentioned above good things? Absolutely! Is every team ready to adopt them? NO.

100% of the teams that I’ve coached were not ready to take on the additional stress of learning these practices that Scrum does not require. The FIRST thing they had to work through was how to be a team. How to understand what commitment means. How to respect and trust each other. How to feel and be empowered. How to build trust with the customer that had been long lost or most likely never existed. How to better predict what will be delivered. What it means to deliver VALUE.

Focusing on these things is many times almost more than a team can handle. I’m surprised that anyone would think it would be a good idea to right away add on top of this the pressure of learning new technical practices. The fact of life is that most enterprises do not have the processes, infrastructure, or culture that allows quick adoption of modern development practices. Change takes time. Take a deep breath and embrace it. Only then will you be able to make real change.