Last Tuesday, on 4th of May, 2010, I was participating the TIEKE Brief #10 “Scrum – ketterästi” as a speaker. I was closing the brief with a title “Reality Check”. There is much hype and unfounded optimism on Scrum and Agility that I felt it was appropriate to try to ground some of that. Scrum and Agile is hard. Change is hard. It’s easy to write bad software expensively; it’s very hard to try to do as good software as you only can with as little waste as possible. It is known that most Agile transitions fail to meet the expectations.

While the presentation should be appearing also on the TIEKE site, I’ll post it to my presentations page (also linked to this post). It’s in Finnish and in a very much simple format. Should I expand in text? Okay, will do quickly…

Agile isn’t a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve most of the problems typical organizations have. It will expose them. It’s up to the organizations to fix their bad habits or poor operation. Scrum is pretty quiet on “how” (purposefully, because it isn’t a methodology), so we must turn our attention to other sources. Lean Software Development gives a pretty good overview on the kind of product development Agile environments should foster. An upcoming book by Stephen Denning, labeled Radical Management, takes a more comprehensive look at how businesses can become radically better. Dan Pink made a great case in his TED talk about how rewards are actually damaging our businesses and our innovation. Etc. There’s lots to learn for us.