XNSIO
  About   Slides   Home  

 
Managed Chaos
Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
`
 
RSS Feed
Recent Thoughts
Tags
Recent Comments

My reaction to “Nokia Test for Scrum”

I had heard about Nokia Test several times before and always discarded it without looking at the test. (Tells you, how judgmental I’m). Until, recently when I was shepherding an experience report by Jeff Sutherland and some folks from Xebia on Fully Distributed Scrum: The Secret Sauce for Hyperproductive Outsourced Development Teams .

My immediate reaction (then) after reading the Nokia test was, “Say Hi to 21st Century Software Process Police”. Unfortunately nothing has changed since. More details on “Am I post Agile?”

I’ve also seen many people call this as the “Nokia Test for Agile”. Please note that it is Nokia Test for Scrum and not for Agile. Scrum and Agile cannot be interchangeably used. IMHO, being Agile takes a lot more than doing Scrum. Being agile (as defined by the manifesto) is lot more important than doing Scrum or XP or any other process. My mind says, focus on outcomes or goals not means. (in some ways focusing on being agile itself is like focusing on means rather than outcomes).

I say enough of getting caught in proving whether you are “foo Certified” or “bar compliant”.

Focus on building products that make life easy and enjoyable for your users at the same time raising the bar for your competitors.

Now you can ask, well that’s easy to say, how to do it? Understand one thing, there is No Silver Bullet. If there existed any such process that would make all teams successfully irrespective of the people and market they are in, guess what? People are not dumb. Everyone would be all over it. Since there is no such thing called Silver Bullet, you’ll have to figure out what works for you. In my experience defining process tests not only encourages you to focus on wrong things, but also gets in the way of achieving what you really want to achieve.


    Licensed under
Creative Commons License