Recently I am thinking, is it necessary to setup a “standard process” for Agile Scrum practices? That means others, especially for new teams, may follow it in their project execution. But I really don’t like the word of “standard” , that means it will suppose to give some criteria to judge what is correct and what is not. But in Agile world, it might be difficult to make such a judgment. The whole ideas of Agile is to provide a framework the help team to have better communication with the client and deliver high quality product with high business values to the client. We do have lots of thoughts, principles and frameworks to guide us to practice it. But they are hardly to say as “Standard”. For example, in Scrum framework, whiteboard is recommended to be used for transparent communication within the team. And it will include task board and burndown chart. But the idea here is to make the project information to be visible to everyone. So you may add more necessary information on that, like improvement action items, bug trend and etc, if the team consider it will be helpful to the project execution. But if we set up a “STANDARD” like Whiteboard needs to be used for the team and publish the information of task board and burndown chart. The task board needs to tell the task status of “TODO”, “IN PROGRESS” and “CLOSED”. Then it may cause some confusions for some teams like, “can we add a new status for each task like ready-to-test?”. Maybe you will say, of cause it is possible. But for some other cases, like what the retrospective agenda should be, will be more complex and not so easy to set up a standard format. Agile team needs to be self-management / organized, so they need more spaces and flexibility to set up their own way to run Scrum. So…, does it mean that we can do nothing on the whole organization level. I think it may not be true. We can still do something to help the teams, especially new teams, to start their work. I suggest to set up best practices for each Agile Scrum activities on the organization level. As my current consideration, the best practices at least need to cover the following activities but not limited.
I hope there were more inputs and comments from others :-) |
|