SCRUM and The Nokia Test

Was hearing Jeff Sutherland talk about the Nokia test , a test developed by Nokia to test whether you’re doing  Iterative development or not , and if yes if you’re really doing SCRUM.

Are you Iterative ?

• Iterations must be timeboxed to less than 4 weeks
• Software features must be tested  and working at the end of each iteration
• The Iteration must start before specification is complete

The second point throws up a debate on what testing means , most of the companies that do partial SCRUM  try and do a separate test sprint and for them the above “tested”  - means unit tested , or at the most integration tested but not “functional “ tested , I did see a lot of implementations diligently trying to go the SCRUM way , and not being able to make it , because this is where they falter.

Are you implementing SCRUM ?

• You know who the product owner is
• There is a product backlog prioritized by business value
• The product backlog has estimates created by the team
• The team generates burndown charts and knows their velocity
• There are no project managers (or anyone else) disrupting the work of the team

Another place  where most of the teams fail , even if you are doing the first part well , is at the product owner part , most of the times in services industry when we try SCRUM , we look at one of the key customer stakeholder as a product owner , and that stakeholder more often than not , does not understand what is expected out of him and that he too is an important Cog in the wheel , the customer needs to be told and trained on the methodology and needs to be completely on-board for SCRUM to be successful.

Typically most of the SCRUM Masters are project managers who are taking on those roles and some of the old habits die hard , the fourth point above about the “team” generating burn charts  will not be true in these cases since the project manager / SCRUM Master has this urge of asking people the status and updating himself – so the team / team members really do not know how they are all running together , usage of tools becomes very important here , in  the absence of tools , there should at least be enough diligence to make sure that each team member takes upon himself the task of going and updating the status so the burn chart gets generated.