Anand DebVentyx Inc. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
One of our client has decided to go with Scrum and we being CMM L5, there seem to be a 'perception' mismatch. Any thoughts? Saving Changes...
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John ReilingSeeking new opportunities | AcroVision Business Systems, Inc.Mendham, Nj, United States
This is just a casual observation, without looking real deeply, but there does appear to be a mismatch. But then again, it could work very well! It depends, and this could be a great experiment!
Scrum is considered to be pretty 'free-wheeling', bottom-up process where things are developed more on the fly and iteratively. The small develop team has a great deal of freedom to design, architect, develop, and test small (2 week increments) pieces of an application as they go.
CMMI tends to look at the big picture and design from top down, where, when the smaller groups actually execute on the project, it has been pretty well planned out and documented.
That being said, your company would probably need to take a look at how to apply the best of both, and develop a sort of "integrated process". At first look, I would think that the way the WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) is created could be the key to this. You would probably want to set parameters as to the granularity of the WBS, and break down the work, within the framework of CMMI, to fairly large chunks - say 2 week chunks - that could then be developed in a scrum format.
It would be very interesting to see if you can find the equilibrium between the top down aspects of CMMI and the bottom up approach of scrum. I would think there is some potential here to create something of value. One challenge I would expect is the culture clash between strong-willed individuals in each respective camp.
Anand DebVentyx Inc. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Thanks John! Although a paradox at its face value, we are trying to map the same. Culture issue is the number 1 barrier! Internally, as a vendor, we have to map it to the client's processes, but on the other end there are resistance - primarily being additional overheads. The more I delve deeper into it, the more I realise that its more of a perception of CMMI & Scrum not being able to mix than it actually is in practice! Saving Changes...
Wayne MackRetired| RetiredSouth Riding, Va, United States
It would require some tailoring of process documents, but in general, Scrum provides a very good meeting framework to incorporate key processes. Scrum Planning meetings are really just CCB meetings. Adjusting priorities of tasks and assigning them to iterations is really good risk mitigation. The major factor to address in adopting Scrum is the creation and maintenance of artifacts.
If your CMMI auditor will allow observation of ongoing meetings in lieu of written documentation of the meetings (usually attendence lists and minutes), then you are set. In our case for daily meetings, we had everyone sign in on a whiteboard and took digital photographs of the whiteboard and other postings in our daily stand up meeting room. These consumed space on the hard drive but required minimal time commitment to generate daily "minutes." Saving Changes...
