In my opinion traditional ways of software development have proven not to be successful. Of course there will be some examples that prove the contrary, but in general software projects are delayed and cost more. Clients are not satisfied, neither are development teams. Fortunately it is possible to solve this. Last week I discussed this issue with a “competitor” and I gave him the book “Agile Software Development with Scrum”. At GOYELLO we decided to implement Scrum among others based on this book and we are very happy with the results. That’s why I would like to share this with you.

“Agile Software Development with Scrum”, has been written by two “Godfathers” of Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle. In a very comprehensive way they share their own experiences with the reader and they show how they found out about Scrum. Especially when you are facing issues with software projects or are improving your software development processes you will recognize a lot of the things they mention.

Scrum: A team-based framework to develop complex systems and products.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for developing any product or managing any work. It allows teams to deliver a potentially shippable set of functionality every iteration, providing the agility necessary to respond to rapidly changing requirements. As mentioned above, it can be used to manage any type of work. However, it is most commonly known as a iterative way of software development.

A good source of more information about Scrum is the website of the Scrum Alliance.

The most important thing I learned by reading the book is that you have to implement Scrum to its full extent before you start adjusting it to your own needs. We already implemented parts of the Scrum way of working some time ago. This resulted in some improvements. After reading the book I decided to change our strategy. We implemented Scrum rather strictly, for some colleagues it may even be too strict. Now I agree that this is the only way of implementing Scrum.

You need to experience it to be able to value it!

I am not going to claim that we are done now. Because as soon as you think that you are done, you find something new to improve. That’s a fact of modern life and we enjoy it. And Scrum is the methodology that allows for managing constant change.