Improving Productivity
Learn how Scrum helps support measured improvements for your teams and how to approach process improvement generally.
ABOUT THIS CHAPTER How do you summarize effective Agile’s approach to process in four words? My answer is, “Fix systems, not individuals.” I talked previously about decriminalizing mistakes, which is important. But decriminalizing mistakes does not mean ignoring them—it means coming together in an open, respectful, collaborative way to understand the factors that led to the mistake and changing them so that the mistake cannot happen again.
A common misimplementation of Agile is, “Work as fast as possible”—but this prevents ever really getting better. More effective Agile implementations concentrate on going faster by getting better.
Scrum as a process improvement baseline
If we go back to the days of Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM), Level 2 was a “repeatable” process. That established a baseline that supported measured improvements at higher levels in the SW-CMM. A high-fidelity Scrum implementation accomplishes the same purpose. The Scrum team has a baseline process that it follows consistently, and the team can improve from there.
Process improvement guidance
The desire to improve productivity is pervasive, but how do you know whether your team is improving? How do you measure productivity?
Although software productivity is next-to-impossible to measure on an absolute scale, story ...