Scrum and XP in short

First of all, I seem to be the proverbial man who can't do it so he teaches it. I've not worked in a Scrum or XP environment, but I did read a few books about them and this is what I gathered. I beg of you to point out any mistruth or inconsistency. You might want to take a look at this previous post, more general post, on the matter of agile development.

Some key elements of all agile methods I've read about are:

• the code does not belong to any programmer, in other words anyone can change any piece of code in order to solve an issue
• the members of the team are interchangeable, so not a bunch of experts in different fields, but people that can do all things (and be easily replaced by people just as agile as them :) )
• the members of the team must have similar competencies, one cannot do pair programming between a rookie and a senior, for example. That is called teaching :)
• the client is supposed to change their mind often and unpredictably, one plans for the unplannable
• the client must be represented in the agile team, so as to not have delays or misunderstandings in requirements

Scrum

The Scrum system does seem to be more of a disciplined way of developing than a method in itself. There are Scrum principles that must be upholded, but if you ignore them, the whole system looks like this:

• All development is done in fixed time increments called Sprints. Scrum specifies 15 or 30 days, although I bet most dev companies actually plan this on a calendaristic month.
• At the start of each Sprint a meeting of 8 hours takes place (so the first day) in which half of it is to present the requests by the Product Owner (in our case that would be either the client or the person that did the analysis) and the other half to plan which of the tasks in the Project BackLog (requirements list) can be done in the current Sprint. This last part if the responsability of the Team (that would be the developers and their team leaders and managers).
• In the last day of the Sprint two meetings will be held: a 4 hour meeting that will allow the Team to present what was done in the current Sprint to the Product Owner (this would be an informal meeting that "is intended to bring people together and help them collaboratively determined what the Team should do next") and a 3 hour meeting in which the ScrumMaster (the person in charge with the implementation of Scrum in the project) "encourages the Team to revise, within the Scrum process framework and practices, its development process to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint"
• The development is one in the rest of 28 days
• Each day there is a 15 minute Scrum Meeting held within the Team in which "each Team member answers three questions: What have you done on this project since the last Daily Scrum meeting? What do you plan on doing on this project between now and the next Daily Scrum meeting? What impediments stand in the way of you meeting your commitments to this Sprint and this project? The purpose of the meeting is to synchronize the work of all Team members daily and to schedule any meetings that the Team needs to forward its progress".

What is important about these Sprints is that at the end of each sprint the product should be fully implemented, tested and ready for production. At each increment the client could just take the product and leave. Any changes to the specifications must be included in the backlog and prioritised so that the developers apply them in the next Sprints. Once a Sprint is planned, there are no changes to it.

So, as far as I understand, this is a method of making rigid planning for very small periods of time, then executing it, effectively reducing each project to a bunch of smaller ones. Instead of "Make me a business management application" there will be projects like "Make me a member management interface", then "Add activities management" and so on. It reminds me of the time when I wanted to learn in college and I would divide the number of pages I had to understand and memorize to the number of days remaining till the exam.

I don't consider Scrum a very innovative way of development, although back in 1986 it probably was, but that's also good. One can easily adapt some of these ideas to their own system of development. By allowing the developer to build a finite number of things in a predetermined time, they can select a time to test the application in which they are certain no more requests will delay that process. Of course, I don't know what happends if the client changes their mind about a thing that is supposed to be done in a Sprint. Do we abandon the task in the current Sprint and plan it modified in the next? Do we build it as if nothing happened, then start making the changes or, worse, remove it?

XP (Extreme Programming)

The Extreme Programming development method seems to have the same roots as Scrum does. The idea is to develop in successive iterations that encapsulate planning, testing, development and refactoring. The "12 principles" of XP are again and again mentioned in the book, but I think that's crap. The most important ideas in XP, to me at least, seem to be :

• User stories as requirements gathering; Most important! a detailed story of what the user will do and why, like a narrative, the Word version of an UML flow diagram, which is the responsability of the client! The actual developing is the implementation in code of those stories
• iterations, which in the case of XP don't have a specific time length, each one is planned depending on what there is to do and what can be done
• the separation of user and client, the user is the one that actually uses the program, while the client... well, you know
• user-on-site, you can always ask the user what they think and receive quick feedback
• Test driven development, which, together with pair programming, seem the only actual extreme parts of XP, where they insist on tests first, programming later.
• Spikes: small bursts of programming for no other reason than to research an idea. Developers don't have to be rigurous in spike programming, since they only do the bit of code, test its functionality, then throw it away, the idea being that they learn how to do the actual code they wanted to do and what problems they might be facing. In this particular case, the spike is part of the planning or designing of a piece of code.

I will mention here Pair Programming as well, although I clearly don't see it happening. The idea is that two programmers sit on the same machine, one programs, while the other does just-in-time code review and thinks of the large implications of the code. While the concept is sound and I seldom find myself wanting to be able to code and also think in a larger context, I don't see how this can be done anymore than a master painter could get help from a second one that watches from afar and keeps nagging him on how to do things. Besides, sitting near a code that is being written sounds both boring and terribly frustrating.

But then again, I always like talking to other programmers that are as passionate as I am, so maybe a hands-on discussion, even an argument, might provide the drive to good code. Besides, it is harder to waste time on news sites and online games when you have some guy next to you :)

Conclusion

My conclusion is that agile is a solution to the problems that arose during the Waterfall days. It is not a solution to all problems and it certainly presents some level of difficulty in implementation.

I believe it would be hard to do in a small team with high turnover. One needs a stable team that works well together and has a decent management to implement agile development. But I do see it as a positive thing, as it puts the needs of the customer first and, no matter how good a coder you are, your primary goal is to satisfy the client.