Our team was working on a replacement for our current production system a few years ago. The development manager had a brilliant idea. We would have a stand up meeting every morning. There were multiple problems with that idea. We were so busy due to being behind schedule. The meetings lasted a long time. That put us even further behind. Eventually the manager was fired, the project was canceled, and we lost our client. Ouch.I suspect this manager was trying to implement a part of Scrum. That left a bad Scrum taste in my mouth. This does not mean that Scrum itself is bad. Just my particular experience with it. Scrum itself is a framework to create your development process. There are 4 core principles which emphasize individuals, completed functionality, customer collaboration, and responding to change.
There are a number of roles in the Scrum framework. A product owner manages the business. A ScrumMaster manages the team. And the team determines what to do by itself. Yeah. From the outside that seems problem prone. The Scrum activities are to prioritize all work, meet every day, demonstrate success, and search for improvement.
One artifact I find useful in Scrum is backlog. This contains a list of features that have been prioritized. At any given time you know what high priority items need to go in an interaction. I am still not sold on the rest of the Scrum framework. That will require me being part of a Scrum success story.
