THREE ELEMENTS OF CHAOS AND FRUSTRATION BEFORE THE SCRUM FRAMEWORK To better understand the impact of the scrum framework to our software engineering practices and businesses, it makes sense to have a look at a day in the life (or a software project in life). Therefore, I would love to briefly talk about a software project from the past before we adopted the scrum development and software delivery framework in our organizations. A few days before I wrote these lines, we had lunch with one of my ex-colleagues with whom we used to work together almost 20 years ago. This gentleman, Marcus has got his scrum master certification and scrum product owner certification from International Scrum Institute™. He currently works as a scrum master for one of the leading software houses in the agile project management software domain.
As a scrum master, Marcus is now in charge of operating an agile scrum team whose scrum team members located in geographically distributed locations around the globe. During our lunch, Marcus admitted that there are a lot of typical challenges with distributed agile scrum teams. Some of the problems he specifically mentioned related to his software project configuration are: • Differences in working styles among scrum team members, • Timezone differences, • Cultural misfits, and • Language constraints. Despite these difficulties, Marcus still added that running a software project with the agile scrum process is more fun, productive, and enriching than how we used to work 20 years ago. Compared to days when we used to work without scrum software development and scrum software delivery processes.
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