Writing my masters thesis: What makes agile (Scrum) teams successful?
Categories: Software, Professional, Consulting, AgileSince the dawn of 1999, a few guys like Kent Beck (eXtreme Programming), Ken Schwaber (Scrum), Alistair Cockburn (Crystal Clear Family), Jim Highsmith (Adaptive Software Development) and Jeff De Luca (Feature Driven Development) with others got fed up with treating the highly uncertain, always moving world of software development as a civil construction project. Traditionally, money and time were spent on writing requirement documents, plans, analysis og design before a single line of value-providing source code was written. Programmers hated it, managers got frustrated and customers never seemed to get what they needed. So these guys decided to change the rules, play a different ballgame, get the job back on the programmers premises. And with the promise that the customers would love it, quality of delivery would increase and each penny spent would provide end-result value. Too good to be true? Well, it worked… most of the time.
So, 10 years later, the Aglie Software development wave has hit home. Most software developers are familiar with the term while others are religious followers of agile stating “there is no other way than the True Way of Scrum”. But seriously, what in fact makes such projects tick? What’s really going on under the hood that makes agile projects successful?