Tuesday, April 9, 2013

XP Technical Practices Essential to Successful Scrum Adoption

I recently led a team adopting Scrum which did not have XP technical practices in place such as: Test Automation, Test-Driven Development, and Continuous Integration.  As a result, the Scrum team's velocity and cadence suffered as they were more or less completing a manual, mini-waterfall cycle within each two week sprint.  The analyst would do requirements analysis on the user stories then pass them to the developers to write the code.  Next, the testers would test the code during the last 3 days of the sprint with each fix/test execution cycle requiring manual code deployment, test setup, and test execution.

The manual nature of their deployment and test processes were not as evident during their traditional months long waterfall cycles, but became magnified once the iteration cycle time was shortened to a 2 week sprint.  Since this was the organizations first endeavor into agile, the low velocity and cadence cast a negative shadow on Scrum with people in the organization resistant to change labeling the Scrum project a failure. 

I contend that the agile practices did exactly what they were designed to do: expose problems and issues quicker so they could be addressed by the team.  Although Scrum and XP are focused on different aspects of development: Scrum on project management and XP on technical practices and it is possible to use one without the other, I recommend that they be used together to maximize results.

Scrum Project Management Practices
  • Self-organized, cross-functional teams
  • Prioritized Backlog
  • Iterative Adaptive Planning
  • Customer Feedback
  • Daily Stand-Up Meetings
  • Spring Retrospectives
XP Technical Practices
  • Test-Driven Development
  • Refactoring
  • Simple Design
  • Continuous Integration
  • Test Automation

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