Here’s How to Fix It

Software development is a complex process, and teams that aren’t agile in their approach are doomed to fail. The Agile Manifesto provides guiding principles for teams that want to deliver high-quality software while constantly adapting to the changing priorities of the business. Two of the core principles of agile development are reflection and continuous improvement. Scrum, one of the most popular frameworks for agile software development, has become mainstream, but many teams have adopted it without fully understanding the principles of agile development. If you’re focusing solely on estimation, velocity, and productivity, you’re doing Scrum wrong.

The Assembly Line Model

The Assembly Line model is a common approach to Scrum that focuses on maximizing productivity, often at the expense of reflection, experimentation, and continuous improvement. In this model, the team treats Scrum as a rigid process, and every effort is made to measure and control velocity. The story point becomes the unit of production, and significant overhead is invested in estimating tasks, developing burn-down charts and sprint reports, and providing status in the daily standups. The focus is on maximizing feature output, leaving little room to invest in automation, paying down technical debt, learning new technologies, improving documentation, or experimenting with the development process. This approach effectively turns software development into an assembly line process, where there’s no time for rest or reflection.

The Role of the Product Owner

The Product Owner is a critical member of the Scrum team, and her role is not to act as the customer but to clearly articulate and communicate the product vision and mission, relative priorities, and the customer voice. In successful Scrum teams, the Product Owner works closely with the engineers, physically sitting with them every day, and constantly communicating the product vision in high fidelity. Conversely, the engineers explain the technical aspects of the product to the Product Owner, allowing her to gain a clear understanding of technological capabilities, limitations, and feasibility. When the Product Owner is treated as a customer, it creates a gap in understanding and communication that can lead to misalignment and mistrust.

The Role of the Scrum Master

In Assembly Line Scrum teams, the Scrum Master is essentially a project manager whose role is to provide status updates, assist with backlog grooming, and do capacity planning. In successful Scrum teams, the Scrum Master acts as a coach and mediator, ensuring that the team is tightly integrated, clearly communicating, truly seeking to understand the problem, raising issues, committing to the principles, and driving experimentation to continuously improve. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the team is following the agile principles and not just the Dogma of Scrum.

Sprint Planning

The purpose of the sprint planning ceremony is to ensure that all high priority tasks are clearly defined and actionable, that clear success criteria are understood by the entire team, and to commit to a scope of work that will not be broken or altered during the course of the sprint. By this time, the Product Owner should have already clearly defined and prioritized the backlog, so that the engineers can quickly and efficiently estimate story points and determine the clarity and feasibility of each task. The story point is not a measure of effort, but a measure of complexity. If a story is scored as a 3, then all of the variables are known, and it is a simple matter of churning out the work. If a story is scored as an 8, however, there are many dependencies, unknowns, poorly defined criteria, or risk to break other parts of the code.

Final Thoughts

In the end, the success of Scrum teams comes down to the culture that the team creates. By embracing the principles of agile development, experimenting with the process, and constantly seeking to improve, teams can develop a culture of high performance and trust. By focusing on the dogma of Scrum, teams risk turning agile development into an assembly line process that stifles creativity and innovation.

If you find that your team is struggling with the assembly line model of Scrum, it’s time to take a step back and reevaluate the principles that made agile development so successful in the first place. Focus on communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement, and the rest will follow.

At the end of the day, the success of your team is not measured by how many story points you completed or how fast you delivered a feature. It’s measured by the value you delivered to your customers, and the satisfaction you feel as a team knowing that you’ve created something great.

So, take a deep breath, step back, and remember the core principles of agile development. By doing so, you will find that you are not only more productive, but also happier and more fulfilled as a team.