Our first official Scrum project finished it’s first Sprint successfully today. I’m a bit jealous since they have institutional support, while I’ve run multiple Scrum style projects without buy-in from the business. In fact our PM group has officially explained to us that we can’t use Agile methodologies.
We’ve adopted the bulk of the practices such as daily standups, 30 day iterations, planning meetings, project retrospectives, and a product backlog. Still we’re stuck in a traditional waterfall process for the overall project, so everything moves slower and we have to wait a lot because we’re the only ones running a 30 day Sprint.
Our culture is still very much waterfall oriented. We’re backing out code on a project right now because our process only allows features that are fully documented to be added even when the customer wants them. We’re so set in our process that just removing access to the new features isn’t good enough. We have to remove all the actual code to comply with our process. If we don’t our QA team won’t test the application at all.
It’ll be a nice change when Agile/Scrum becomes the default practice instead of only being officially allowed on pilot projects.