Entering the Scrum
Posted: Wednesday, February 09, 2011
by Robin Whitlock
http://robinwhitlock.blogspot.com/
Mel Pullen, former Chief Systems Architect of Nokia’s Symbian Foundation, runs Scrum IT, an IT training scheme that employs a programming team fundamentally consisting of young apprentices, with an average age of 19. Working within a collaborative environment, they create social media-enabled mobile applications utilizing skills that some commentators claim require a considerable period of industry experience to learn. The software development programme is being monitored by eSkills which is the Sector Skills Council for Business and Information Technology with the added assistance of apprenticeship tutors from Cambridge Regional College who have been closely observing the scheme over several months.
He states that psychosocial software development methods accelerate learning through team interaction in a collaborative environment. This has generated some quite heated debate within the IT community in Cambridge. Mel’s novice programmers are now developing systems for Android and the iPhone aimed at their own peer age group and this has attracted the attention of university graduates who are appealing to join the scheme themselves. As a result, what was initially designed as a IT training programme for school leavers is turning into a new model of software development training that has attracted support from HE, industry and the government alike. This is partly because his young programmers are working to a high standard within a time frame that many within the industry originally thought to be unrealistic.
Mel however emphatically defends his particular approach to training. “I have come to believe myself that writing web apps is really an advanced craft skill” he says. “Coding can be learned like carpentry. There is no “Hogwarts-style magic” in programming”. Mel believes that a new approach is urgently needed in the current economic climate. “Given that we are rapidly ‘offshoring’ much of our software development on the grounds of cost” he explains, “at a time when 10-20% of our young people have no jobs at all, it seems absurd to deny their generation a chance to learn these important skills and profit from them here in the UK.”
His view appears to be relevant not only to school leavers but also to many leaving higher and further education only to be greeted by bleak career prospects. “The demand to join the apprenticeship scheme from qualified graduates” he observes, “also demonstrates something that higher education needs to take on board: advanced learning benefits from collaboration and project-based approaches that teach practical skills as well as the theory.”
Scrum is not new. Mel points out that the approach was developed over a decade ago by Ken Schwaber and Dr Jeff Sutherland and that it’s now being used as standard in a diverse range of companies including Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, SAP and many others. Reports indicate a marked improvement over traditional training methods along with increased productivity and morale.
Scrum is often seen in agile software development and has its origins in work developed in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. This was a new holistic approach to product development which they compared to playing rugby where the whole team moves as a single unit but passes the ball back and forth between individual players. As a result, the approach became known as ‘Scrum’, a name applied by Peter de Grace and Leslie Hulet Stahl in their 1990 book Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions. This was subsequently adopted by IT software developer Ken Schwaber of Advanced Development Methods with a similar approach being followed by Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna of Easel Corporation. In 1995, Schwaber and Sutherland presented a joint paper they had written to the Business Object Design and Implementation workshop at OOPSLA (a conference organised by the US Association of Computing Machinery) in Austin, Texas.
Scrum is essentially a process skeleton under the control of a project manager who is often referred to as the ‘Scrum Master’. Another main role is that of the Product Owner who is a representative of the stakeholders and the business. The ‘scrum’ itself is a team of about 7 people who actually do the main design, testing and implementation. The ‘scrum’ works in a series of ‘sprints’ of about two to four weeks duration over which the team produces a potential product. Each sprint conforms to high level requirements which define the product’s features. A ‘sprint meeting’ decides which of these features will be adopted and the team then decides which of these features can be completed during the next sprint. After each sprint, the team demonstrates how to use the software.
From this it can be seen that the team is essentially ‘self-organizing’. The process embraces the principle that the clients can at any time change their minds about what they want and need and so the team follows an empirical approach in that nothing can be fully planned or understood and instead concentrates on moving quickly reacting to current developments and emerging requirements.
Despite apparent complexity, the process is actually quite simple and is fast becoming a very popular method of IT training and software development in business precisely because of its flexibility and adaptability and there are now many websites available for scrutiny on the internet ready to explain how the procedure works, one of which claims that you can restructure your way of working in as little as 30 seconds.
Who would have thought that a rather macho sport generally played on mucky winter days would have one day given rise to a high profile business technique?
Now where’s my ticket to the game tomorrow.......
www.millhousedata.com
‘Psychosocial Software Training – a movement started in Cambridge’, 6th September 2010, Cambridge Network, http://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/article/default.aspx?objid=73979
‘You can’t get the staff nowadays’, 19th March 2010, Cambridge Network
Takeuchi, H. & Nonaka, Ikujiro (January–February 1986) ‘The New Product Development Game’ (PDF), Harvard Business Review.
DeGrace, Peter & Stahl, Leslie Hulet (1990). Wicked problems, righteous solutions. Prentice Hall.
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