I spend my working days helping companies use scrum and other agile practices to create healthier working environments and increased business value. Today, I found myself reflecting on the path that led here. Below is an abbreviated timeline of events in the evolution of scrum. I’ve included a few bits of my journey with scrum as well.

An Abridged History Of Scrum

1970
Winston Royce publishes “Managing The Development Of Large Software Systems.” This paper is often cited as the origin of waterfall development. While Royce describes what became known as waterfall, he argues against it in the paper. He actually advocates for a more iterative, two pass approach, instead of the single pass of waterfall.

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I encounter scrum teams changing, or worse, creating, story estimates during their sprint planning meeting. This slows down the meeting and it undermines the whole purpose of estimation: predictability.

Predictability is knowing what the business will get and when. Stakeholders might ask the team: “Can we get these features by the end of the year?” Or: “When will the new feature set be ready?”

In a sprint planning meeting, the only predictability needed is a simple yes or no. Is the story (product backlog item) in the sprint? If it’s in, then the stakeholders can expect to get it by the end of the sprint.

The purpose of estimates is to support longer-term predictability, meaning when are we going to get stories from the product backlog? This leads to the reason why we should not change estimates in sprint planning.
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Sprint planning is the cleverly named event where the scrum team creates their plan for the sprint. The outputs from sprint planning are: the sprint goal, the forecast of which product backlog items will be delivered, and the team’s work plan.
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A client who is basing their scrum adoption on the LeSS scaling framework recently sent me the following question about the role of manager in Large-Scale Scrum.

Question

I’ve read that when scaling scrum with LeSS, cross-functional teams need to have one manager. The author advocated strongly for this, but in reality, I’ve seen this fail miserably. Losing the domain owner causes the group to skew heavily to the bias of the team manager, as well as lose the ability to strongly drive and foster domain expertise. I’ve seen product people be appointed, and the tech goes to pot. Also, I’ve seen technical people not want to report up through product. I’ve seen engineers as team managers, but it’s rare to find good engineering/product people, and you have the reverse problem. I’m not completely convinced that a team manager is a good idea. Chris, what are your thoughts?
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