Apr 28, 2020
In this episode, Professional Scrum Trainer Eric Landes addresses the questions: "Why doesn't Scrum care about good software development?"
Introduction
In my Professional Scrum Foundation classes, sometimes I'm asked, "Why doesn't Scrum care about good software development?" Kind of a funny question, right? Scrum was founded for software development teams and we don't really see that in the Scrum guide. So, for instance, if I look at the Scrum guide and search for terms like tester and development or continuous integration, we don't really see that in the Scrum guide.
Scrum Does Care About Good Software
My answer to this question to the students typically is Scrum does care about software development and one of the first classes from Scrum.org was for the Professional Scrum Developer course and Ken Schwaber created that, he's a software developer at heart and in his background. So very passionate about good practices there. And this course teaches Scrum along with good software engineering practices. Things like test driven development, continuous integration, those kinds of things where the foundation of the course and as with all courses you create an increment of software over the course of multiple Sprints. You create multiple increments of course. So, I'm a Professional Scrum Developer Trainer, love the course. And one of the things I do love about it is we keep incorporating fresh trends, trends like DevOps for instance, infrastructure is code, telemetry and monitoring. Those are all things that are incorporated now into that course. So Scrum.org is always modifying, inspecting and adapting as good Scrum should do on their courses.
Build the Right Team
The idea that Scrum doesn't care about good engineering practices though is not actually correct, but the Scrum Framework encourages development teams to have all the skills necessary to create that increment, that complete increment. So, for instance, if your team doesn't have the ability to do infrastructure as code, they don't have the right person so that you can get all the way to production, you need to get somebody on your team to do. Also, self-organization means we as a team have to decide which practices we're going to utilize. Scrum may not say specifically you need to use these technical practices and it's not prescribing them. But Scrum gives you some good basis from your Professional Scrum Developer course on what practices are good and go well with Scrum.
Self Organize
Scrum assumes that you as a self-organizing team are going to come up with those good engineering practices to create that finished increment that delivers what the customer wants and you're going to continue to keep up on good trends and what the software needs for your customer. So, in the end, Scrum does care about good software engineering practices, it's just not prescriptive about it. And if you're interested at all in the Professional Scrum Developer course, keep in mind it's been made for all different kinds of languages. Java, C sharp, JavaScript, React, those kinds of things can be modified and used with that course.
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