Scrum defended at STPCon
By Robert Mullins
April 16, 2008 —
SAN MATEO, Calif. — A leading evangelist for Scrum software development says that the method takes some getting used to, but it does its job: create a quality product with few bugs.
“It’s all about people, and a few bugs,” Robert Sabourin, president of software development consulting firm AmiBug.com, in his keynote speech today at the Software Test & Performance Conference.
Sabourin presented two case studies of the software development problems faced by his client companies, which he did not identify, and how Scrum addressed those issues.
Scrum is a form of agile software development that involves a closely linked team of developers, testers and product managers incrementally developing and testing software in an iterative process. The term comes from rugby, and it describes how play resumes with players from each team grappling for the ball.
Scrum iterations, which typically last 15 to 30 days each, are supposed to end with the creation of “shippable code,” he said.
In one case study, a data processing company thought it would do a pilot project in Scrum to see how it might work, but shortchanged the project in many ways, Sabourin explained. Software development teams and testers were in different locations, the product “owner”—the person in the company who would use the software—was not fully engaged in the project, and the development team was constantly being interrupted by IT support issues elsewhere in the company. The project also suffered from redundant bug tracking.
“It was an inertia problem,” Sabourin concluded. He recommended that they choose a more important project as a pilot and treat it like a real project. He added that development and testing teams should be colocated, and that the product owner should be fully engaged. What’s more, redundant bug tracking should cease.
In a second case study, an information management company was bogged down with documentation that had slowed the development process. The company had seven levels of design documentation that took three months to approve. Documentation was inconsistent and testing procedures were “heavily scripted,” Sabourin said.
The Scrum project that he recommended replaced documentation with “storyboards” that explained more simply what the customer needed the software to do. Sabourin paraphrased John. F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your software does for users. Ask what your user does with your software.”
The Software Test & Performance Conference was produced by BZ Media Inc., which also publishes SD Times.
Related Search Term(s): Scrum
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