ScrumBut - Kick it out and change to ScrumAnd

Note:

These all  articles are dedicated to my teachers, my seniors, colleagues, internet bloggers, online technical material, reference books from where I learned all these. There are chances that the material presented here is duplicated somewhere on the web. If anything is replicated anywhere, I sincerely give proper credits to the contributor.

To understand the "Scrum But", I expect that the readers have some understanding of Scrum.

Hello, today we are going to see what is Scrum But. And of course, in simple words as we used to do always.

All agile practitioners know about Scrum. Just to refresh the memory, what is Scrum?

SCRUM: As per the Original Scrum Guide, written by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland:

"A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value"

You can find the original scrum guide here:

http://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2016/2016-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf#zoom=100

So, original Scrum is defined in Scrum Guide and that is immutable. You cannot change it at all. You can use your own tools and techniques, but you cannot change the soul of original scrum.

The original idea behind the Scrum is to create potentially shippable products within short sprints. That is the  soul of Scrum. Team has to create an increment which is potentially shippable, doesn't matter Product Owner decides to ship it or not.

For organizations with historical development practices and infrastructure, the most common scenario after applying Scrum is that the Scrum Teams may encounter issues that will impede their effort to create potentially shippable Increments within short Sprints. Scrum will expose such dysfunctions in the current organizational ecosystem. It is normal and expected.

The organization should try to correct these dysfunctions, BUT What Happens Instead?

Did you notice the "BUT" above.

Sometimes organizations take the route of ScrumButs to handle these dysfunctions.

ScrumBut refers to an adjustment or modification made to Scrum, so that the organization can hide the problem instead of addressing it.

In simple words, Organizations use ScrumBut to hide their weaknesses to implement the Scrum correctly.

Scrum.org defines ScrumButs as having a particular syntax:

             (ScrumBut)(Reason)(Workaround)

Scrum.org provides some examples of ScrumButs:

     "(We use Scrum, but) (we cannot build a piece of functionality in a month,) (so our Sprints are 6   weeks long.)"

     "(We use Scrum, but) (sometimes our managers give us special tasks,) (so we do not always have time to meet our Definition of “Done”.)"

Hiding the weaknesses using ScrumBut will take away the opportunity for organizations to address them and become agile.

So it is pretty obvious from the above examples that the organizations who are not able to implement scrum may quote something like:

"You know, we use Scrum, but we have limitations........"

And this way they deviate from the original Scrum which is not allowed as Scrum is immutable.

So Mr. Ken Schwaber wants to change this Scrum But to Scrum And, how? He mentions in one of his articles:

I’d like to change this phrase from Scrum But to Scrum And.  The new wording might be, “We use Scrum and we are continuously building, testing and deploying our increments every Sprint,” or “We use Scrum and we are collaborating and brainstorming within the Scrum Team to increase Value every Sprint.”

And if organizations really start working on Scrum And, soul of original scrum will survive forever.

So Agile practitioners, no more Scrum But. Lets follow "Scrum And"

Thanks