Scrum and the Enterprise

The Scrum methodology of agile software development marks a dramatic departure from waterfall management. In fact, Scrum and other agile processes were inspired by its shortcomings. The Scrum methodology emphasizes communication and collaboration, functioning software, and the flexibility to adapt to emerging business realities — all attributes that suffer in the rigidly ordered waterfall paradigm.

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Scrum and the Enterprise

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As Scrum continues to grow in popularity, one of the hottest topics on the minds of the community is how to translate the benefits of a paradigm created for small, collocated teams for enterprise-level installations of hundreds, if not thousands of users. Given that communication channels increase (and therefore communication decreases) as the size of a team grows, this issue is only compounded when teams begin to scale to Scrum-of-Scrum configurations. Clearly, the solution is a tool designed specifically for Scrum projects that can allow teams to remain small, but nonetheless connected to the bigger picture.

Of course, the tool also needs to be flexible enough to meet the unique demands of large and complex development environments. For example, large organizations often develop products with shared components, which require the ability to plan releases against multiple backlogs. And while Scrum and other agile management methods have steadily crept into the software development landscape, the project management tools available have not kept pace.

But all that may be changing now. I just watched a screencast of ScrumWorks Pro 4 (you can watch it, too, here: http://danube.com/sw_flash/release-4/) and this release’s new functionality makes it the first truly enterprise-ready Scrum tool. Namely, it addresses the issue outlined above by allowing customers to manage high-level features and releases that span multiple product backlogs. This is a really important breakthrough. Before that functionality existed, organizations had to creatively develop workarounds for their agile tools to achieve the same effect, but, still, with less-than-ideal results. Now, products can be associated with multiple programs, which, in turn, allows shared components to be modeled accurately while providing organizations with a more realistic view of overall progress. This is going to eliminate some very big headaches for some very big companies… You can read more about it here.

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