Common Challenges in Scrum

Scrum is not a process – rather, it’s a framework which provides a lot of visibility to the team, and a mechanism that allows them to “inspect and adapt” accordingly. Scrum works by making visible the dysfunction and impediments that are impacting the team’s effectiveness, so that they can be addressed. For example, most teams are not good at estimating how much they can get done in a certain period, and so will fail to deliver what they committed to in the first Sprint. To the team, this feels like failure. But in reality, this experience is the necessary first step toward becoming more realistic and thoughtful about their commitments, and also being even more committed to delivering what they signed up for. This pattern – of Scrum helping make visible dysfunction, enabling the team to do something about it – is the basic mechanism that produces the most significant benefits which teams using Scrum experience.
One very common mistake teams make, when presented with a Scrum practice that challenges them, is to change the practice, not change themselves. For example, teams that have trouble delivering on their Sprint commitment might decide to make the Sprint duration extendable, so they never run out of time – and in the process, ensure they never have to learn how to do a better job of estimating and managing their time. In this way, without training and the support of an experienced Scrum coach, teams can morph Scrum into just a mirror image of their own weaknesses and dysfunction, and undermine the real benefit that Scrum offers: Making visible the good and the bad, and giving the team the choice of elevating itself to a higher level.
Another common mistake is to assume that a practice is discouraged or prohibited just because
Scrum doesn’t specifically require it. For example, Scrum doesn’t specifically require the
Product Owner to set a long-term strategy for his or her product; nor does it require engineers to seek advice from more experienced engineers about complex technical problems. Scrum leaves it to the individuals involved to make the right decision; and in most cases, both of these practices (along with many others) would be well-advised.
Something else to be wary of is managers imposing Scrum on their teams; Scrum is about giving a team space and tools to self-organize, and having this dictated from above is not a recipe for success. A better approach might begin with a team learning about Scrum from a peer or manager, getting comprehensively educated in professional training, and then making a decision as a team to follow the practices faithfully for a defined period (say, 90 days); at the end of that period, the team will evaluate its experience, and decide whether to continue.
The good news is that while the first Sprint is often very challenging to the team, the benefits of Scrum tend to be visible by the end of it, leading many new Scrum teams to exclaim:
“Scrum is hard, but it sure is a whole lot better than what we were doing before!”

Results From Scrum

The benefits of Scrum reported by teams come in various aspects of their experience. At
Yahoo!, we have migrated nearly 90 projects to Scrum in the last 30 months, totaling almost
900 people, and the list of teams using it is quickly growing. These projects have ranged from consumer-facing, design-heavy websites like Yahoo! Photos, to the mission-critical back-end infrastructure of services like Yahoo! Mail, which serves hundreds of millions of customers; they range from entirely new products like Yahoo! Podcasts, which used Scrum from concept through launch (and won a Webby Award for best product in its category that year), to more incremental projects, which included work on new features as well as bug fixes and other maintenance; and we’ve used Scrum for distributed projects, where the team is on separate continents. Several times each year we survey everyone at Yahoo! that is using Scrum
(including Product Owners, Team Members, ScrumMasters, and the functional managers of those individuals) and ask them to compare Scrum to the approach they were using previously.
Some summary data is presented here:
Productivity: 68% of respondents reported Scrum is better or much better (4 or 5 on a 5- point scale); 5% reported Scrum is worse or much worse (1 or 2 on a 5-point scale); 27% reported Scrum is about the same (3 on a 5-point scale).
Team Morale: 52% of respondents reported Scrum is better or much better; 9% reported
Scrum is worse or much worse; 39% reported Scrum is about the same.
Adaptability: 63% of respondents reported Scrum is better or much better; 4% reported
Scrum is worse or much worse; 33% reported Scrum is about the same.
Accountability: 62% of respondents reported Scrum is better or much better; 6% reported Scrum is worse or much worse; 32% reported Scrum is about the same.
Collaboration and Cooperation: 81% of respondents reported Scrum is better or much better; 1% reported Scrum is worse or much worse; 18% reported Scrum about the same.
Team productivity increased an average of 36%, based on the estimates of the
Product Owners.
85% of team-members stated that they would continue using Scrum if the decision were solely up to them.

Daily Scrum

Once the Sprint has started, the Team engages in another of the key Scrum practices: The
Daily Scrum. This is a short (15 minutes or less) stand-up meeting that happens every workday at an appointed time, and everyone on the Scrum Team attends; in order to keep it brief, everyone stands (hence “stand-up meeting”). It’s the team’s opportunity to report to itself on progress and obstacles. One by one, each member of the team reports three (and only three) things to the other members of the team: What they were able to get done since the last meeting; what they’re hoping to get done by the next meeting; and any blocks or impediments that are in their way. The ScrumMaster makes note of the blocks, and then helps team members to resolve them after the meeting. There’s no discussion during the Daily Scrum, just the reporting of the three key pieces of information; if discussion is required, it takes place right after the meeting. The Product Owner, Managers, and other stakeholders can attend the meeting, but they should refrain from asking questions or opening discussion until after the meeting concludes – everyone should be clear that the team is reporting to each other, not to the Product Owner, Managers or ScrumMaster. Some teams find it useful to have the Product
Owners join and give a brief daily report of their own activities to the team, though this is at the team’s discretion.
After the meeting, the team members update the amount of time remaining to complete each of the tasks that they’ve signed up for on the Sprint Backlog (figure 5). Following this update, the ScrumMaster adds up the hours remaining for the team as a whole, and plots it on the
Sprint Burndown Chart (figure 6). This graph shows, each day, how much work (measured in hours or days) remains until the team’s commitment is completed. Ideally, this should be a downward sloping graph that is on a trajectory to hit zero on the last day of the Sprint. And while sometimes it looks like that, often it doesn’t. The important thing is that it show the team their actual progress towards their goal – and not in terms of how much time has been spent so far (an irrelevant fact, as far as Scrum is concerned), but in terms of how much work remains – what separates the team from their goal. If the curve is not tracking towards completion at the end of the Sprint, then the team needs to either pick up the pace, or simplify and pare down what it’s doing. While this chart this can be maintained electronically using Excel, many teams find it’s much more effective to do it on paper taped to a wall in their workspace, with updates in pen; this low-tech solution is fast, simple, and often more visible than an electronic one.

Sprint Planning Meeting

At the beginning of each Sprint, the Sprint Planning Meeting takes place.
In the first part of the Sprint Planning Meeting, the Product Owner and Scrum Team (with facilitation from the ScrumMaster) review the Product Backlog, discussing the goals and context for the items on the Product Backlog, and providing the Scrum Team with insight into the Product Owner’s thinking.
In the second part of the meeting, the Scrum Team selects the items from the Product Backlog to commit to complete by the end of the Sprint, starting at the top of the Product Backlog (in others words, starting with the items that are the highest business value for the Product Owner) and working down the list in order. This is one of the key practices in Scrum: the team decides how much work they will commit to complete, rather than having it assigned to them by the Product Owner. This makes for a much more reliable commitment; first, because the team is making it, rather than having it “made” for them by someone else; and second, because the team itself is determining how much work will be required, rather than having someone else decide how much “should” be required. While the Product Owner doesn’t have any control over how much the team commits to, he or she knows that the items the team is committing to are drawn from the top of the Product Backlog – in other words, the items that he or she has rated as most important. The team does have the ability to pull in items from further down the list if it makes sense (for example, pulling in a slightly lower priority item that can be quickly completed as part of higher priority work).
The Sprint Planning Meeting will often last a number of hours – the team is making a very serious commitment to complete the work, and this commitment requires careful thought to be successful. The team will begin the Sprint Planning Meeting by estimating how much time each member has for Sprint-related work – in other words, their average workday minus the time they spend attending meetings, doing email, taking lunch breaks, and so on. For most people this works out to 4-6 hours of time per day available for Sprint-related work.