Scrum was developed so as to enable the delivery of large numbers of quality software within short time boxes known as Sprints (Sutherland, 2001). These sprints last a period of one month. Scrum involves having short, daily meetings among all the people who are on the software delivery team. The delivery team includes software analysts; coders; designers; deployment staff; product marketing team; and support staff. Scrum adopts a strategy that assumes the requirements can change between the initial stage of specifying the product and the delivery of the product. It follows the principle of completely knowing the requirements of new software only when the users have had the chance to use the software (Sutherland, 2001). Scrum was developed because the waterfall approach towards software development was not meeting the full demands of the software users. The users need to see versions of software so that they can know what they want.
The implementation of Scrum present challenges to the practitioners. The practitioners face challenges that involve new technologies and new tools (Sutherland, 2001). The aim of Scrum is to provide the user with high quality software that meets his needs; therefore, the practitioners have to use implementation strategies that will deliver the software that meets all the requirements of the user. The practitioners encounter new technologies and tools within the different companies where they are supposed to implement scrum. They have to take time and learn about these new technologies and tools. It is impossible to predict which strategy will be the best to implement the new software, so the practitioners have to work with the programs being used by the users so as to select the best implementation strategy.
The software systems that are built nowadays are object oriented and depend on the inputs from the environment to determine the outputs (Sutherland, 2001). Practitioners have to factor in the focus of the users so as to use an implementation strategy that will lead to the output desired by the user. Users have different goals and programs towards achieving these goals. The practitioners have to take time and work with the users so as to ensure that all the requirements of the users are met. It is also their duty to train the users on how to use the new software. The implementation of Scrum will require the practitioners to watch out for new software requirements that arise within the process. The software has to be adjusted to meet these requirements.
The implementation of Scrum has to factor in a lot of factors such as different time zones and location of the teams (Sutherland, Schoonheim, and Kumar, 2009). Some teams are co-located while other teams are distributed. Communication is one of the problems that face organizations based on their different areas of operations. Scrum has attacked the communication problem of co-located teams. Distributed teams contain people from different geographical locations and cultures. These people speak different languages such as French, Chinese, English, Spanish, and Korean. Communication between people of different languages is very difficult. There is also the issue of different working styles adopted from the different cultures. Daily scrum meetings are organized so as to enable these distributed teams to break the cultural barriers and differences in the styles of work.
The offshore teams tend to use Scrum models that are not agile or cross-functional. This alienation reduces the effect of Scrum, and the productivity level in companies. Such cases are solved using a model known as Distributed Scrum of Scrums (Sutherland, Schoonheim, and Kumar, 2009). This model creates partitions of work across isolated Scrum teams. The model eliminates unnecessary dependencies that slow down the implementation process. These distributed teams can communicate with each other via Scrum-of-Scrum, and have meetings that enable them to share information.
Scrum can work in any environment despite the challenges these environments present. Scrum can scale up to suit the size of the different companies. The practitioners face challenges, but Scrum provides room for ideas and implementation of solutions. The meetings held by the scrum teams give room for generation and sharing of ideas.
Works Cited
Sutherland, Jeff. Inventing and Reinventing SCRUM in Five Companies. CTO. 2001. Print.
Sutherland, Jeff, Guido Schoonheim, and Kumar N. Fully Distributed Scrum. Agile Conference. 2009. Print.
