Doug Seven wonders accountability issue with Scrum.  And yag wants to discuss this further.  If you read follow up comment Doug posted for his entry, you can easily discover that the team is still in learning phase.

Folks.  Scrum is not a magic bullet.  There is no such thing as a magic bullet.

Only three sprints.  Do not expect the productivity to go up dramatically after three sprints.  It doesn't matter how many training sessions team had with who.  It doesn't matter how many books team members read.  And it really doesn't matter whether you have an experienced Scrum Master in the team.  It takes time.

Scrum Master should be careful about painting a rosy picture when working with a team that does not have any Scrum experience.  Scrum Master is responsible for setting the correct expectation with the team and working with the team to guide them through the initial dark-period.  Team productivity will dip.  It will probably be worse than whatever previous process the team was using.  Team moral will dip.  People will start questioning whether Scrum is the right thing or not.  Management will put increased pressure to the team as the team struggles to meet their commitment sprint after sprint.

Every aspect of Scrum is very different.  User stories instead of full spec, size-based estimates, daily meetings, acceptance tests, velocity tracking, new engineering practices such as TDD, Continuous Integration, pair programming.  It requires a mind shift.  And expecting the team to produce more stuff after just a few sprints is just wrong expectation.  It will NOT happen.

So, going back to the accountability issue.  I think management and Scrum Master should be held accountable in Doug's team's situation since they set the wrong expectation and have not given ample opportunities to the team to learn this very different way of developing.

Technorati Tags: