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Thank you! I will now consider measurement as a prominent piece in evaluating SCRUM. I suppose it is true that while I may trust my team to create its own schedule and develop effectively, it could be hard to see the bigger picture of progress without explicit user stories and regular customer acceptance. I guess one issue I have is that while it's nice to see explicit, visual progress, that doesn't always translate to how "done" I personally feel the project is. I often come up with my own areas of improvement that I feel need attention while developing, and SCRUM limits this creativity.
– stapo
Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 15:43
2

I personally run a modified SCRUM where we periodically (once every four or five sprints) run a refactor sprint. The difference between a regular sprint and a refactor sprint is that during a refactor sprint developers submit all the stories. Basically ignoring product owner's priorities. My boss accepts this as a necessary evil to avoid code rot. Also, sometimes stories triggers a refactor when more than one programmer feels the code that needs to be touched is "yucky". When that happens I allow developers to submit their own stories.
– slebetman
Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 23:00
(continute).. Developers submitting stories are of course, strictly speaking, not recommended. But SCRUM does not work properly if code quality degrades. If your code is such a mess that it takes weeks to implement stories then you are no longer "agile". Try suggesting the above two changes to management. Also, don't loose sight that SCRUM is just a tool - one that takes lots of practice to use correctly but in the end just a tool.
– slebetman
Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 23:06
Additional note: I originally sold the idea of a refactor sprint to management by making refactor sprints only one week rather than a full sprint. Nowdays it is a full sprint but that's mainly because the product is basically fully developed and is now in maintainence/incremental upgrade mode.
– slebetman
Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 23:11
+1 for slebetman's comment about having refactor sprints. This sounds like an effective way to get rid of technical debt. If you do this regularly and not when things are already out of hand and the product owner and managers are okay with it, I can imagine that it helps fixing any problems with code quality that have occurred during the last sprints.
– Anne Schuessler
Commented Jan 13, 2011 at 8:02

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