The project that I'm on is being run as a pure Scrum project. I'm still forming my thoughts, but I think it's still worth sharing my first impressions.
I'm something of a reactionary old architect; I still instinctively like to design a lot up front. I'm fully aware that design still has a part to play in Scrum, but I do feel better with more up-front thought about the problems.
I've been surprised at how heavyweight the Sprint meetings feel (Planning, Review and Retrospective). We were running a 2 week sprint and it felt like we spent far too much time in these meetings, it felt a lot better when we moved to a 3 week sprint.
The Scrum Owner role is critical. He or she needs to keep all the meetings very well focussed. The meetings can become very wasteful if they are allowed to drift.
On this project I've been introduced to Behaviour Driven Development using JBehave and will use BDD on any project that I can as it has made developing and refactoring the system infinitely easier. Being able to form a contract in English with the customer for the functionality and automatically regression test it brings to the integrated system what Unit Testing did for individual classes.
Speaking of Unit Testing, I've been doing purer and purer Test Driven Development. I'm don't think I'll ever be a purist as I find that sometimes you need to do exploratory programming.
I do find it sensible to limit the scope of my firm estimating to just the upcoming Sprint; I'm fed up with being forced to give estimates for a poorly understood system 6 months or a year in advance. I also like the fact that Scrum works so well in the face of changing requirements. There has been no project I've ever worked on without chanign requirements and scope creep and Scrum keeps the effects of those changes very visible to the stakeholders.
As the project moves towards production I'll blog again on how well Scrum has worked.
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