Evolution of Scrum
I’ve been using and studying Scrum ever since I heard about it from Linda Rising 12 or so years ago. At its core, Scrum is a pattern language and it’s been evolving as people find better ways of doing things, and the patterns have changed. This post will give a very quick overview of what I’ve seen change. I believe that Scrum has gone through two significant versions, and I’m willing to guess what the next version is. To track these stages of evolution, I’ll number them Scrum I, II, and III and then direct your attention towards the interesting points of evolution.
(Scrum I, Early Scrum, 1995-2004-ish) PO usually external to team, negotiates sprint backlog with the team. The Scrum team self-organizes, produces “done” product, and has a Sprint Review with the PO, who either approves or disapproves the work. The only way to “officially” change requirements in the middle of the sprint is to have an abnormal termination and start over. After the sprint the team (sometimes including the PO) has a retrospective to improve its process, and the PO modifies the release plan.
This leads to a number of Issues/Forces:
- adapting to business changes within the sprint is difficult
- hard to talk to PO for additional guidance during the sprint
- often caused the team to view the PO as “one of them” and not “one of us”
- many teams created a “Product Owner Proxy” who represented the PO day-to-day on the team
(Scrum II, Modern Scrum, 2002-Present) PO internal to team, and negotiates sprint backlog with rest of team. The team (including the PO) self-organizes, produces “done” product that is accepted by the PO along the way. Teams develop various methods for re-prioritizing and bringing in new work during a sprint (negotiating techniques, mid-sprint re-planning, etc). The Team (including PO) reviews the results with external stakeholders during the Sprint Review and receives feedback that changes the release plan and is incorporated into the next sprint’s planning. After the sprint the team (including the PO) has a retrospective to improve its process.
Differences:
- PO on team
- more in-the-sprint changes to Sprint Backlog
- PO is more a part of the team’s day to day work
- Adaptive Evolution of the Product is finer grained
- Focus on delivery to Stakeholders, not PO
There were/are some Issues/Forces:
- Still not quite adaptive enough for some
- “last few” stories on sprint backlog are always being supplanted by new ones
- Sprint lengths got shorter to allow for mre frequent feedback and planning
- can’t make the sprints as short as we’d like to because some stories just “take that long”
(Scrum III (KanBan-ish version), 2007-Present) There is no Sprint Backlog, only Work In Progress (WIP), which is fixed length set of stories currently being worked on. There is still a Sprint, which is a fixed-length timebox that defines the time between reviews, the changes to release planning, and the setting of sprint goals. At the beginning of the sprint the Product Owner negotiates goals for the sprint with the team. The team is constantly grooming and reprioritizing the backlog. When a story is completed, a new one is moved up to the WIP and begun. At the end of the Sprint there is a Sprint Review for the Stakeholders where the completed work is reviewed.
Differences:
- Sprint Backlog replaced by WIP
- because is WIP, stories can go across sprint boundaries
Note that this evolutionary change is much smaller than the former. Perhaps we are converging on a final solution – I don’t know. I have no idea what comes after this. We’ll just have to wait and see what issues come up, and what patterns emerge.
Dan Rawsthorne, PhD, CST
Transformation Coach
dan@danube.com
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