Agile and Scrum Smells

In 2003 Mike Cohn started this project with a paper entitled: Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells (pdf – in the spirit of Code Smells) and last year Rowan Bunning did a presentation Sharing More than Deodorant for Scrum Smells (pdf). Rowan encouraged me to create a wiki with all of these smells. So I’ve spent some time in the past few days fleshing out this Catalog.  These are a series of simple patterns that describe a problem and then offer some potential solutions.

As it stands today the Catalog contains nearly 20 smells:

• Persistent Signatures
• ScrumMaster Assigns Work
• The Daily Scrum is For the ScrumMaster
• Specialized Job Roles
• Testers will not integrate with Team
• Reluctance to estimate Backlog Items
• Is It Really Done inspired by Henrik Kniberg
• Nothing Ever Changes Around Here inspired by Henrik Kniberg
• No One Wants to Attend Retrospectives, by Mark Levison
• Executive Pressure inspired by Henrik Kniberg
• Missing Sprint Commitment inspired by Henrik Kniberg
• Technical Debt inspired by Henrik Kniberg
• Not Acting Like a Team inspired by Henrik Kniberg
• No Engineering Practices, by Mark Levison
• Gorilla in the Room inspired by Mark Wainwright

But to improve this we need you help:

• Proofreading
• Most smells need a better discussion
• Most smells are missing case studies
• More smells

Sample Smell:

Nothing Ever Gets Better Around Here

1. Smells

• Retrospective doesn’t happen
• No actionable items generated from Retrospective
• Actions aren’t taken
• Non-team members attend the meeting
• No one wants to talk
• The same issues come up time after time

2. Discussion

If we’re not continuously improving we’re not really Agile. So what happened?

3. Causes

• Action Items if they exist, don’t have owners.
• Action Items get forgotten as soon as the Retrospective is over

4. Consequences

• Team fails to improve

5. Prevention

6. Example Remedies

• After discussing issues – ask team members to suggest concrete actions (see Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great for some great ideas).
• Ensure that action items are small and achievable.
• Ask a for one volunteer to own each action item.
• Action items can’t be assigned to people not present at the meeting.
• Discuss action items as part of the daily standup – at least a few times during the iteration.
• Post action items in a highly visible location

7. Case Studies

Credit: this is based on material from “10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP” by Henrik Kniberg, and personal experience.