House-rules software development
A major challenge in all of these methods is the aspect of change management – that is, a team moving from how they developed software yesterday to this new way of working. Scrum is the most successful certification program of the methods we’ve discussed so far – the Scrum Alliance has given out 1.4 million certifications (http://web.archive.org/web/20230527080619/https:/www.scrumalliance.org/) and Scrum.org over 800,000 (http://web.archive.org/web/20230314185320/https:/www.scrum.org/certification-list). Due to this, most organizations we work with at least “talk Scrum”, but that only provides high-level project management. It does not tell teams how to develop or test. When we talk to teams about how they work, we generally get one of two answers.
- “We developed our own in-house method, called name-of-company method.”
- “It depends.”
Of the two, we find “It depends...