Scrum: Going Wider and Deeper

Despite the occasional claim that “Agile is dead!” and announcements of Scrum being past its selling date, all the available evidence is that it is gathering ground: going wider and deeper. I have had the considerable pleasure of attending two events recently, both hosted by the Scrum Alliance. Whatever criticisms might be levelled at the Scrum Alliance, there is no doubt that Scrum’s dominance in the Agile community is in large part due to its efforts. The first of the two events was the Scrum Gathering at New Orleans from May 4th to May 7th. Evidence that Scrum’s reach is getting wider was provided by the fact that it was the largest global Scrum Gathering to date. 550 people attended, and 300 of those (myself included) were attending their first Scrum Gathering. That the Scrum community is diving deeper was demonstrated by the Scrum Coaching Retreat Europe, which took place in Teddington, London between June 9th and 11th, attended by 80 people – a quarter from outside the UK – wanting to understand better how to coach organizations in their adoption and implementation of Scrum.

Scrum at the Crossroads?

Linking the two events was the sense that Scrum – and Agile in the broad sense too – are at the crossroads. Part of Scrum’s past includes what might be called ‘Bad Scrum’. Bad Scrum takes many forms. ‘WaterScrum’ or ‘ScrumFall’ are when development activities that appear Scrum-like are either preceded by, or succeeded by practices that are decidedly linear and sequential, and the whole workflow is dominated by master-planning. In these situations we can confidently predict a number of things.

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