Scrum has been around for the past 21 years, with Scrum.org fueling and supporting the methodology since 2009. According to the organization, today about 90% of teams use Scrum, and more than 1 million people have taken the Scrum.org assessments. But with the recent innovations and ever-changing trends in the software development space, is there still a future for Scrum? Dave West, product owner and CEO of Scrum.org, says yes.
West spoke at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta about the past, present and future of the popular agile methodology. While the organization recently released the Nexus framework, a lightweight exoskeleton for those looking to scale Scrum, and recently added values to the Scrum guide, Scrum.org is not done helping Scrum evolve—and neither are software developers.
(Related: Agile 2016: Happy workers are productive workers)
According to West, there are a variety of different concepts of “done” in the software industry. Some teams believe they are done when they finish development; others believe it ends at operations; and then there are a few that don’t believe you are done until you reach business agility.
“What we see is that ‘done’ is being fragmented across many organizational boundaries; people don’t really get it, there is not a universal definition,” he said.
To address this problem, West revealed that the organization is working on a Scrum Development Kit, similar to a developer’s SDK. While the organization still isn’t exactly sure what it intends to do with the Scrum Development Kit, the intent is to provide Scrum teams everything they need to deliver working software. According the him, the kit will include development environments, the definition of “done,” best practices, architecture tools, development standards, apps and module calls, and support for ALM toolsets.
In addition, West revealed the organization has Scrum Studio in the works, making it a new approach to enterprise agility. According to him, you can’t do incremental change inside of an organization because it is impossible to change the culture. “We are seeing over and over again a repeating theme that ultimately the only way to build an agile organization is not to start with an existing organization,” he said.
Scrum Studio will provide a model that organizations can use to grow agile and Scrum. It will use evidence-based measurement, ensure a consistent development path, introduce and support an SDK, and aims to set a standard for professional software delivery.
“[Scrum] is not over yet, is it?” he said. “We need to continue to improve. We need to fix some of these issues of delivering value to our customers. We need to stop failing in that pursuit. We need to become more professional, [and] we need to move away from water-Scrum-fall.”
