I thought of doing a few short posts on the why’s of agile and specifically scrum. Product owners are driven by ROI, so why should we not adopt the same attitude regarding the various “ceremonies” and practices we adopt in our day to day agile development lives… why do I do <something> and what is the benefit of doing it?.
I think it’s important that people understand the rationale behind doing something (like time-boxing for example) before simply adopting it, unless, of course, you like the idea of arranged marriages 😉
Here’s a couple of starters I’ll try cover:
- Why is it important that the team decides what work should get done?
- Why do scrum “by the book” first, and then change it?
- Why do we time-box?
- Why are the roles, and the clear separation of roles, so important in scrum?
- Why have a retrospective?
- Why demo?
- Why use a physical scrum board?
- Why should the team run the scrum board?
- Why use a tool to help you run your project?
- Why the daily stand-ups?
and others …
Feel free to give me some answers, but I’m not really interested in someone else telling me the answers. This is more of a personal journey of discovery so that I myself can understand why I do what I do, and yes, the answers may not be perfect, but every great journey must start with a first step…