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Let's say I have my vision and now my product backlog of items. That part is in writing and ready to be used. I am about to create my sprint(s). I am curious. When does a programming team sit down and say "let's use this platform, this framework, and language" and things like "We need a class here," or "I see a way we can use an Interface with that" and so on. When is that kind of talk going on?
Are there meetings that come before the sprint where someone decides for all teams - "We are going to use Linux, MySQL, PHP and CodeIgniter" and then one of the teams has a sprint to implement that infrastructure, while other teams wait for completion to start the other sprints (team A2 build a ui or security model and the features of it from the product backlog)?
Is this also where tools like trac would be used at the team level, when the sprints first begin?
Sorry if I'm all over the place with this. I've just never seen it done and just when I think I understand it I think of a new question.
Also it's beside the point but what do you name your teams? Bob's team, Smith's team, something more colorful?
Thank you.
Short answer is "It depends" as for the first part there could be other teams that dictate those kinds of terms to some extent. For example, on my current project some things are almost a given,e.g. IDE=Visual Studio, Bug tracking=HP Quality Center, Version Control=Subversion, O/S for developers XP Professional,etc.
There can be a Sprint 0 where some infrastructural elements are handled like a CI server, wiki for the team, making sure everyone has accounts in SVN, and other administrative things to get handled.
Team names like code names can come up at anytime though they can have different meanings as what someone can use for a team name in one place may not be so good somewhere else,e.g. Team Voltron may not go over well for those completely unfamiliar with the term.
Some teams start their projects with a Sprint Zero, where they refine the vision, define the global architecture (choices of platform, language, not class or interfaces), the definition of "done"...
This Sprint is special, it's about preparation and, unlike the other sprints, might not lead the team to deliver any working software..
If you are part of an agile-scrum team, chances are there your company
already has defined patterns and
architectures.
In my opinion scrum-teams are not responsible for design, There are separate design-teams who are responsible for overall design and integration-plan of any ongoing projects.
The design-team does the strategic part of projects development phase which is architecture, design and integration plan. These teams may have their own scrum sprints.
Scrum-master along with team-leads are responsible for tactics of implementing projects as per design.
programmers, testers and QA engineers have operational responsibility of writing and testing code.
I would split it into few parts.
Things like choosing tools/platforms (Linux, MySQL, PHP etc) I'd have agreed before even starting sprint 0. I consider sprint 0 more like setting vision and high-level architecture which, to some point, is dependent on tools/platforms of your choice. People you'd like to have in the team will also be different for ASP.NET project than for PHP project.
Another thing is moving to discussions like "I need a class here and interface there." This level of details can't be really decided up front during sprint 0. We just go with these decisions all along the way. This mean we're changing our architecture rather often but it's a rare situation when changes are deep. And almost always when we change something it is well-grounded decision.
To summarize: key technology decisions before you start, high-level architecture during sprint 0, lower-level design decisions whenever needed (during sprints).
"Sprint 0" is the standard approach to starting up. For ongoing major architecture decisions (switch toolkit, language, platform), a series of investigation spike stories have worked well if they are as small and focused as possible. The story is to address a specific question or prove a concept. Infrastructure questions can -- and I'd argue must -- be broken down into small stories or you may wander off the map.
Smaller infrastructure changes have sometimes worked well as a "tax" to other stories, sometimes not. (E.g. research and add a dependency injection tool, switch to generic hibernation tool) Taxing stories requires excellent communication between product and development. It presumes that some eager dev has already done some late night homework on the infrastructure.
Without success, we've tried hoping major architecture decisions will happen over the course of normal work. This fails because scrum keeps you too focussed.
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How to move a team from waterfall development model to scrum model? What all are the steps that one need to follow to achieve a smooth transition. What would be the acceptance curve and will it be successful altogether?
First the team needs to want the change, and the business has to support it.
There isn't a set sequence of steps, and success can vary widely, as much depends on your particular situation.
I'd recommend getting Mike Cohn's book Succeeding with Agile, which gives some excellent advice for such a transition.
Though there are many ideas on how to implement scrum within an organization, starting with one team is certainly a consistent thread. So good work on starting that way. From there find someone with experience in implementing agile. A contractor, a colleague, or advice at meetup groups. Here's a link to one I have attended in the DC area - http://groups.google.com/group/dcnova-scrum-user-group
From there, my opinion is to adapt scrum to your team. It's size, it's need for adjustment, etc. Everyone has opinions, but if your team doesn't buy it, it's not worth it. Don't take that as a license to cut things from scrum. Keep the daily standups, the commitment, the retrospectives, the demo (etc), but adjust the size of the sprint, etc.
I recently saw a compelling presentation that advocated implementing pieces of scrum/agile as the team/business was ready. See this gentelman's site for details - http://www.dragile.com/
A big key is to not get lazy - do scrum. And have a high standard. If you're going to go it alone (which can be dangerous) - read your heart out. Read examples, talk to others, go to meetups, etc. Don't let your inexperience in scrum sour your team to it.
Another good link for an example of one team's experience implementing scrum.
http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.pdf
In my experience with learning to manage a team using agile there are two critical components to making agile/scrum work. I think that Jody's point about not being lazy is really important, with the more free-flowing work pattern of agile it can be easy to succumb to skipping meetings or other such nonsense.
Get a good web based task tracker. This allows developers to login and see what they need to do and will help track progress. I've been very happy with Pivotal Tracker (www.pivotaltracker.com). Of course the tracker is only worthwhile if you actually keep it up to date, which leads me to point two.
Having meetings EVERY day. The daily standup discussed in the scrum and agile books is by far the most important aspect of the routine. Keep the meetings short, do it in the same place at the same time every day. Update the task tracker during this meeting and keep it organized.
Transitioning a team from waterfall can be difficult. Having everyone on the team read about scrum is important. Also, understand that not every aspect of the scrum model will work in your environment. Facilitate an open discussion about what aspects of the model you want to adopt as a team. The more input you get from the team the more buy-in you'll have.
How to move a team from waterfall development model to scrum model ?
Strategizing Phase:
Well, the first step off course is the thought for change. Then comes the buy-in from the Management, and the Product Development Teams.
Release Planning and Virtual Product Discovery:
Ideally, you would start by identifying all stakeholders and identifying all the requirements by using the Agile Release planning method - which is a really lean way of doing Release Planning. You would identify virtual products at this stage if not already identified.
Team Forming and Infrastructure:
Next step would be forming cross functional teams based on what virtual products need to be built. This step can be tough. It may require RE-organization. Cross functional teams mean there will be no requirements gathering team, or software development team, or QA team. You would have to pull a experienced lot of people from each department to form a cross functional team. A Scrum Master and a Product for each team will have to be appointed.
Basic infrastructure will need to be established for the cross functional teams to operate smoothly, without interruption.
Start Sprinting With Team(s):
Start following the Scrum/Agile principles and have them Sprint. Capture various artifacts and use them to inspect and adapt.
WALAH you are Agile!
What all are the steps that one need to follow to achieve a smooth transition. What would be the acceptance curve and will it be successful altogether?
Steps are mentioned above in order. Acceptance curve varies based on how well you execute the steps I mentioned above.
Lastly Yes, off course it will be successful. 100% guaranteed successful.
Kidding, I wish I could guarantee that, but I can't. :)
What I suggest is this - When you read my statement "Yes, off course it will be successful", the hope you might have got, just hold on to that hope and take that first step!
I happened to be a part of a team which was migrating from waterfall to scrum. If the teams large and distributed, I don't think its easy for everyone to migrate to scrum all at once as a change in organization takes certain amount of days/months/years.
Once such approach that you may like to try is Tracer Bullet, although this term is used more in agile world, but you can surely prove your point to get the buy-in and lead by example if you/your team is stuck in the middle of waterfall and scrum and are looking to go nowhere in quick time.
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If one does use Scrum for the Software development portion of a project, does one still use PMBOK or some other project management methodology for the "other" tasks on a project e.g. the business, marketing, training tasks. What is the project management of non software development tasks referred to i.e. traditional project management?
A project is defined in the PMBOK as being something of fixed scope, duration and budget. Failure of the project is defined as breaking outside one of the three sides of this "iron triangle". Scrum is a set of principles, and a few concrete practices, for dealing with all sorts of knowledge work, based on Agile values, and is specifically designed for development efforts that may not be projects, or may have flexible scope, duration or budget.
You are right that Scrum only deals with a few aspects of the software development process, such as planning. It only defines a few roles, meetings and artifacts, this is to keep it as flexible as possible. Scrum can, and should, address parts of the value stream outside of the software development itself. However, as you mentioned, it does not deal with lots of things, such as software engineering practices, and analysing the business case.
Often the standard Scrum solution is to "let the team decide" on matters that are not directly specified by Scrum. Often the guidelines for dealing with such matters come from other cultures and value or principle-systems within the Agile world, such as XP, or lean software development. Other cultures providing useful stuff for Scrum teams include Real Options, the Incremental Funding Method, Evo.
Some of the PMBOK stuff can be useful to a "project manager" or PO on a Scrum team, however one has to be cautious as the PMBOK stuff implies a rather different value-system than that which Scrum is based on. It is usually best to look for solutions within the Agile culture. Some of the PMBOK stuff still applies in an agile context though.
If you look for mailing lists related to "agile project management" you will find many thriving communities discussing such topics.
Agile development and PMBOK should not be mixed. IF you do, you're likely to end up with Scrummerfall. I've seen this happen with traditional project managers who convert to agile. They just don't get it and seem to fall back to old patterns.
However, in my opinion SCRUM doesn't cover all you need for project management. It sort of lacks an overall strategy to rule by. One possibility is combining SCRUM with EVO project/value management or other value management methods. It will however require a different type of legal contract with the customer. Projects are then more like a continuous process that is time boxed, restrained by a budget or ends when the customer feels he gains less than his investment (using business cases and goal measures). An added benefit is that the customer will see you more as a long term partner than a short term supplier.
We have expanded scrum to other departments in the company, modeling, texture and animation artist. We had to adapt the method a little, but it does work nicely. We had problems that were solved by using agile methodology. Some smaller departments (audio, special effects) were already working fine so we didn't tried to fix what wasn't broken. Agile would have added an unnecessary overhead for them.
It is not necessary for all departments in a company to use the same methodology, the best is to be adapted for everyones' needs. But scrum can be the solution for people other than programmers, but may need a bit of adaptation. Daily stand-up, sprints, backlog, those can be a good thing for many types of jobs.
If your software development effort is just one facet of a larger project--for example, rolling out a new financial product--then sure, you will have to employ some kind of project management methodology to orchestrate all of the work involved. Fitting a Scrum-based software development effort into a project managed according to PMBOK principles can be challenging, however, since PMBOK prescribes a linear, phased approach to project execution whereas Scrum, like other Agile methodologies, promotes incremental improvement through iteration. That's not to say that the two can't coexist. Like everything else, it comes down to implementation. Just remember to be pragmatic and adapt the methodologies to your needs, not the other way around.
Scrum is NOT a software development method but a project management method.
Besides Scrum is often introduced with Lego, or other artefacts (search for "59 minutes Scrum").
Therefore it can be used to handle all of the tasks of a project, whatever their natures.
While learning about these techniques is great, can I suggest your main focus is actually on running the project and getting stuff done?
EDIT: that's a serious point by the way, not a throwaway quip.
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We have a four person development team that is in need of a formalized project management system. I have a general understanding of Scrum and Kanban but it's hard to truly understand until it's been tried. We don't have the luxury of trying one for a few weeks and then switching to another so I was hoping that someone out there in a similar situation might have thoughts on which worked better for them and why. Also, any other systems for managing development that worked would be great to hear about.
Another note: there's the possibility of the team growing, of course, so we would need a system that scaled well.
Yet another note: We work on three separate software applications in Windows all of which are based on a central library which we also wrote (so i guess you could say four projects)
Both Scrum and Kanban are really process "skeletons". Neither is specific to software development. Scrum was popularised by software development organisations but is positioned as general management technique rather than a software project management technique. Kanban emerged from manufacturing and has been adapted to software development, initially by maintenance teams. Both Scrum and Kanban aim to manage the flow of units of work through the team that is doing that work, measure how fast work flows so that estimates can be made more and more accurately, and make bottlenecks highly visible so that they can be addressed.
Because neither is specific to software development, teams using Scrum and Kanban add software development practices to the process to help them incrementally and iteratively release and improve the software. Most teams, whether working within a Scrum or Kanban process, adopt the technical practices of XP and reflective practices of Crystal.
XP is basically Scrum applied to a single team plus guidelines about what makes code "high quality" and how programmers can achieve that. Crystal Clear also applies to small co-located teams but is more flexible about programming practices although it also recommends the XP practices (the book describing the process is excellent and full of invaluable advice, whatever process you decide to go with). Scrum teams also usually adopt the reflective practices of Crystal: regular "heart-beat" retrospectives and larger retrospectives after every major milestone. Kanban requires continual reflection and improvement but some teams use retrospectives too.
If you want to start applying an incremental/iterative process in a small programming team, then I think XP is a good process to start with because it sets the bar pretty high for technical capability and is very well documented. How continuous-flow and Kanban best applies to different areas of the software development industry is still being debated on the kanban-dev mailing list and elsewhere.
I would recommend also performing regular retrospectives to improve the process and adapt it to your specific situation.
The most important part is to have a reflection/retrospective mechanmism in place which facilitates continuous improvement. Start with some process model and evolve it over time for your needs. Stop doing things that are not worth doing. Keep on doing things that bring in high value. Try new things that you think could be valuable or address specific problems.
I think Scrum works for small to medium team. Compared to XP it leaves out some details, so you can borrow from XP or do something that makes sense. Either methodology you pick, you have to consider the role of chickens(customers/managers/stakeholder/domain experts) role. Sometimes you have to play the roles yourself, but many agile methodologies work because there's external pace car with grounded knowledge of the domain.
Other key aspects are the communication level among your team and some form of quality assurance mechanism. It's hard to do pair programming if you are not located in the same building. Scrum tries to get a feature to acceptance within a sprint cycle, and XP tries to get the feature integrated within the day using unit tests, code review, and continuous integration.
*) Sprint can range from 15-30 days.
What is you question ? Is it which methodology would be most suitable ?
You don't get much benefit from all the overhead that a formallised system will impose with that size of team. Instead, try a good management technique to make sure everyone is listening to each other and blocks are removed.
I've worked with a team of that sice and even bigger on two teams that shared some common libraries. Scrum worked well for us. Now I work with a team with 6 members and we use XP and I think it works as well. The first team developed a product and the influences from 'the outer space' were not that big. So longer iterations worked fine. No we develop a customer project and therefore shorter release cycles are better for us.
But SCRUM and XP are more than that. Now we use TDD and Pair-Programming (both more from the XP world). We also have daily standup meetings that are more SCRUM like. So we adoped XP and SCRUM to work for our project and our situation.
I would start with short cylces (1 week) and reviews of this cycle. It will take some time to adopt a new methodology in your team but if the members are willing to learn and change it will work.
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Let's say you work for a huge company which suddenly decides to do custom in-house software development. Additionally, they want to be able to offer successful developments to their customers as well (if any).
Now you are in charge of it.
What would you see as most important to build a successful software development infrastructure?
flexible to future growth
flexible on used technologies (projects with c, java, .net, web, mobile, ...)
What kind of tools (source control, forge, ...), hardware (virtual, seperate dev & production, ..), processes (guidelines, code reviews, ...), etc.
UPDATE: Please don't answer that you need the right people and the right tools. This is exactly what i am looking for.. What are the right tools and what people of what type would you hire first to join your team? Think of it as you will be the lead of that development.
Set yourself up to pass the Joel Test with at least a score of 10.
I think having the right people is going to be the most important. Nothing else will matter if your programmers stink.
Someone in charge who knows what they're doing.
Obviously, there are lots of factors, but here are the ones I'd say are crucial:
Hire smart people (and pay them what they're worth)
Select good tools appropriate for the kind of development (don't go for cheap tools)
Establish version control system and policies
Establish testing mechanisms and policies
Don't be afraid to outsource the stuff you don't know how to do
Get the best people for the job. If they aren't willing to pay for the best available, or give you a hard time over your personnel budget, you're off to a bad start.
Get the right tools for the job... software, hardware, support contracts from your vendors, etc.
Establish procedure early on for your development life cycle, and make sure that you have the people in place to make use of it. This is everything from how you evaluate Opportunity Assessments to Development, Testing, and post-production support. Make sure you have the people and the tools for each part of the life cycle.
Dont try to be flexible in technologies. First start by focusing on one technology (Java, .NET, whatever...) and then move to other if you need to. You will be able to solve problems using any technologies, but it is very hard to find people good in many technologies.
At the infrastructure level, Source Control is a must. Continuous integration is a plus. Take time to put in place a standard project layout that you will be able to evolve. It make it easier for developers to switch projects. Take time to put in place a good build process (Ant, Maven, in the Java world). Integrate your build process with your IDE so that developers dont have to wait 5 minutes to deploy their project every time they want to test a code change.
I agree with Guillaume: If you want to build a department from scratch, you need to focus. You need to build your team, have everybody grow into their new responsibilities, get to know each other etc. Trying to go into too many directions at once is the direction towards failure.
So, identify the technology you want to develop in. Since the primary goal in your example is in-house development, the in-house requirements will determine your decision. Build your team with that primary goal in mind.
For in-house development, you need at least two people who already know the company and its processes. (Two because one will definitely be ill or on holidays when the first major crisis hits you). On the other hand you need some outsiders, who are not entrenched by the "we have always done it like this" mindset, who can think out of the box. Those should also be at least two people, for the reason stated above. Your job as the team leader is to balance those two groups and integrate them into a team.
For future growth, always think in terms of organic growth.
Do not increase the team size by 200 %, hire one new guy here and another guy (or gal) there. Slowly build your team.
When you take on a new project, always think of expanding your teams expertise. Try something new with every project. That can be a new source repository, an automated daily build process, a new system to write specifications or documentation, or even a different technology (for example Java when you usually develop in .Net, Delphi or C++). Just make certain you never try to make a big leap in an important project. (I once worked for a company who decided to switch from VB 6.0 to .Net for the biggest project they had ever attempted before. They survived. Barely.)
That way your department will slowly but constantly expand its capabilities. Then when the opportunity presents itself to do development for an external customer, you will already have accumulated most of the knowledge you need in order to pull it off.
Oh yes, and smacl is right, too: You need solid QA/QM if you want your department to survive long term.
Start laying out (and follwing) your QA rules from day one. Keep them as short and flexible as possible. Add what you discover to be missing, and throw out what proves to be unnecessary or impractical.
Not sure this is what you wanted to know, but I felt the need to say it ;-)
Develop a strong QA strategy, including acceptance criteria and change control. Preferably keeping it lightweight to suit internal clients. In addition understand how to carry out requirements analysis, expectation management, and resource management.
Put another way, don't just wing it to create crappy solutions that waste more time than they save and are impossible to maintain. Take time to think about what you want and need, how you can achieve it, and what it is going to cost.
I will offer an answer more focused specifically on coding and the developers / architects role in addition to the previous answers on teams, version control, qa etc. which are of course all important.
Many of your decision is very dependant on your specific business and software structure (a single product code base, SOA, many projects etc.) But in general you should always spend significant time up front developing Core Software Infrastrcuture that will pay huge dividends during the SDLC.
Software infrastruture
Coding Naming Conventions Exception
Handling strategies Logging
Strategies Settings and Configuration
Base classes and Helper Classes
General Architecture and Layers
(Presentation, Facade, Domain
Entities, Data Stores etc.)
Design Tools such as UML 2.0
Requirements
Management / End user interaction
There are tons more, but these are certainly some basics to think about. All of the successful projects I have been involved with incorporated decent software infrastructure. I will also note that many of the project that fail have a common theme... lack of a common infrastructure in place. In most cases these failed projects are lead by a non-technical person that think they can simply throw a bunch of ideas at a few programmers and expect them to deliver in a few weeks.
Bottom line, you need to invest some up front planning and prototyping to ensure success in the long term!
Good luck.
Raiford
www.blacksaber.com
The first persons you should hire should be experienced senior level professionals. Then build up from them / with their input. Add the junior people later.
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My company has recently started using Scrum; we've done 2 sprints. We're still learning, but we've definitely exposed and fixed some problems in our development process already. So in general I think it has been good for us.
In reading many of the internet musings about Scrum from evangelists, cynics and everyone in between, three common and somewhat contradictory themes have stood out to me:
Scrum implementation fails because the processes of Scrum are not followed closely enough.
Scrum implementation fails because the organization does not adapt Scrum to its own environment/culture/practices.
The processes of Scrum are not important; only the values in the Agile Manifesto matter.
Examples of these can be seen in the responses to these SO questions:
Have you had a bad experience with Scrum or Sprinting?
Is Scrum evil?
Is Agile Development Dead?
I have to admit that we're not yet following all the guidelines of Scrum: we haven't done a release at the end of the sprints, our Scrum Master doesn't want us to move tasks out of the sprint backlog near the end of the sprint so that he can see how much our planning was off (which means the burndown chart never goes to 0), and urgent customer support issues still have incredible power to disrupt everyone's planning, for a few examples.
My question is: in trying to solve these and other issues, is it better to try and be closer to the official Scrum processes, better to be closer to some of our pre-Scrum processes, or better to meditate on the principles of Scrum to try and come up with a different process altogether?
I would say that you are really missing one of the key components of agility if you don't release early and often. To the degree that you don't do this, your process is not agile and bound to suffer the same sorts of problems that traditional, plan-driven processes have. It may be that this is a temporary condition as you are just getting used to things, but you need to start releasing soon (and regularly).
You'll always have the problem with show-stoppers, but you may be able to help this by shortening your sprint length. The customer may not be able to wait a month, but they may be able to wait 2 weeks for some things. A shorter sprint length, then, may help you to defer some requests to the next sprint making them less disruptive. You also need to be upfront with the customer that the disruptions are actually causing your pace to suffer. They may voluntarily choose to wait if they know that their chosen features are being delayed by some requests.
Another observation that I would make is that, as with almost anything, it's better to start out by following the pattern as closely as you can while you are learning. Once you have a good grasp of the fundamental principles, you can then see where some principles can be bent, broken, or replaced much more clearly to improve the process. Until you really get it, the things you change may hurt or help -- you really have no idea since you don't have the experience that tells you how things ought to be working. Unless your Scrum master is really experienced, you may want to hew closer to the defined practices until you've got a few more sprints under your belt.
Almost everything I've read on Scrum says that one of the keys is to adapt the process to fit your own situation. No two development teams are the same, and different things work for different people.
The main ideas behind Scrum are:
Have a tight feedback loop from requirements to development and back to the stakeholder(s).
This allows the development team to continually verify that they are building something that's actually wanted and allows the development to be easily adjusted as requirements and expectations change. Stakeholders can add or remove features at any point and they can adjust the priority of the features as their needs change.
Keep the software in a state where it's releasable at the end of any given sprint.
That's not to say you have releases every sprint, but that you could if the customer decides they want to have the latest stuff. This also helps a development team avoid the situation of integration hell that comes from people going off and working on a piece of the project on for months at a time in isolation.
Be completely transparent with what's going on in development and everyone needs to be willing to make tradeoffs.
This is where most projects fail and where Scrum can really succeed if everyone buys into the process. So many development projects are set up to where a release has to have X features released on Y date and no flexibility in changing that. This results in half-done features and bug ridden software as the developers cram to get in all the required features on their checklist.
The reality is, unexpected things happen in software development. With open communication and willing participants in the Scrum process, customers and developers can continually evaluate the current state of the project and make educated decisions on prioritizing the work remaining on the project.
Scrum does work. Not with all teams in all situations, but it has been shown to work.
I would suggest trying to embrace textbook Scrum as much as your business environment allows, see how that works out, and then tune it.
Why does your Scrum master not want to move tasks out of the sprint backlog? Does he not 100% embrace the principles of Scrum? (I would see that as worrying in a Scrum master)
Most problems implementing Scrum are actually just problems in the team or business being exposed by the Scrum process e.g. - if your sprints are thrown out by unforeseen support issues this suggests you are not allocating enough resource to support
Every company is different, every project is different and every client is different.
I think it's just as easy to fail by following scrum (or any other methodology) too closely in an environment that doesn't fit the methodology as it is to fail because you follow scrum too loosely in a project that does fit.
At the end some generic answer in a QA site is no replacement to serious analysis of your own project, company, team and clients - there is no magic formula and you have to make your own decision.
Answer: You need to adopt both Scrum and XP together to get the full benefits of scrum.
Reasons:
The reasons are based on years of doing XP and scrum, and specifically on what I learned from Jeff Sutherland's talk (for the ACCU in London, May 2009)
Scrum is a management technique - not necessarily a software production method. Some people use scrum in other domains e.g. preparing museum exhibitions and running religious institutions... so it has the mechanisms you need to make a multidisciplinary team deliver work adaptably in small increments.
Scrum, originally included all the extreme programming practices. Jeff Sutherland actually said that he's never seen a scrum project achieve the higher orders of productivity measured for scrum without using the extreme programming practices.
Scrum and XP both come from the same background - Object-oriented programming, specifically with Smalltalk. The programmers went off and developed XP whilst the management people created scrum. You need both aspects - development practices and management practices.
The XP practices were deliberately removed from Scrum to make it easier to adopt. - Implementing the XP practices is hard and it's difficult to get them adopted quickly. Jeff actually said that Ken Schwaber removed the XP practices to help people get started with scrum. The danger now is that this minimal scrum has become all that people see and expect.
Lots of non-technical project managers now teach scrum - but they don't have the skillset to teach XP
Not all developers find the XP practices easy to adopt - they can be hard sell and it takes a few months rather than the 2 days it takes to establish basic scrum.
Scrum doesn't attempt to address the technical issues in software development. It's just a small management process.
The strength of scrum is that it doesn't get in the way by prescribing lots of unnecessary or irrelevant technical work.
The weakness of scrum is that it doesn't tell you what good technical practices to do.
Extreme Programming does address the technical issues involved in software development and it fits very well within scrum. The reason the scrum people didn't force everyone to do the XP technical practices is that it takes about 6 months to implement those tech practices, rather than the 2 days it takes to implement the most basic scrum.
Whether or not scrum is "evil" - there are certainly drawbacks with it. We discussed the uneasy relationship between XP and Scrum at length at XP Days, London, 2009: http://xpday-london.editme.com/WhereHasXpGone
Scrum is not really the problem that you are showing. Most development methodologies work, even waterfall, as much as we like to bash it, works. Scrum does make you concentrate a little more on the important things, but it won't stop people from making bad decisions like not really following the process.
The system is pretty simple at its core.
See the problem.
Define what done is.
Create a series of tasks that will get you to done.
Estimate those tasks.
Select enough of those so that you can get something done in a short period of time.
Complete the tasks.
Rinse and repeat.
OK admittedly these steps are simplified, and I haven't thrown in a scrum master and a customer. But the point is that the framework is just a basic time management strategy. If the people in your system are chaotic and not good at getting things done then scrum really won't help them.
It's better to start applying Scrum by the book, and to really understand the underlying principles and values from the Agile manifesto, prior to customize it, so that the process does not get denatured. Be sure to run retrospectives at the end of each and every iteration (Sprint) to "inspect and adapt" your process and eliminate waste.
For your Scrum Master, he can track what is removed from the current Sprint. Also Sprints are planned based on the previous Sprints achievement, not on what was previously scheduled. I do no get its point.