Scrum development or project management is a staged framework to be used as part of agile project management, which can increase efficiency and productivity in a wide range of industries and projects. It has become a popular way of working and many of us have or are considering adopting it into our own project management. But are you really ready for scrum methodologies?

The majority of us have seen our bosses, friends or colleagues jump readily on to the scrum bandwagon, attracted by its simplicity without fully understanding whether or not they are ready to adopt it.

They are tempted by short work cycles which produce functional software and the suggested ability to control and produce cycles of work simply by having daily meetings, and who wouldn’t be?

So, the Scrum master is in place, all those involved are fully paid up members of the Scrum fan club and everyone understands how it will work and the project begins with everyone feeling positive that all will go smoothly.

But needless to say, this is not always the case. What many of those adopting Scrum don’t always see it that the software engineering needs to be as ready for Scrum as the humans involved. Otherwise after a few really successful sprints using Scrum, you will often hit a wall, where your productivity dips meaning software release dates are missed and customers get angry. This is when you decided that actually Scrum isn’t that great after all.

But really Scrum methodology isn’t at fault, but the fact that technical practices like Continuous Integration have not been considered alongside it. Without these Scrum facilitates faster working, but may lead to a dip in quality. So the actual problem here is that Scrum alone doesn’t address the engineering of software and so if you don’t use it combined with technical methods the project is likely to run into difficulty.

So the fact of the matter is, however well you adopt Scrum, it is irrelevant if the engineering of your software is not up to fulfilling the projects needs.

As leading suppliers of project management software, Countersoft are experts on all aspects of PM.