Question

Scrum development is based on listing user stories and implementing them in during sprints. That approach – focusing on actual goals of the end product – definitely has its virtues, but what bugs me is that it doesn’t advocate creating any generic/reusable code in the process, and actually I feel like it advocates hacking. For example, if an user story says

Must be able to plot x versus y, and fit a line there.

my first thought is that, “hey, I need to create a generic graphing framework so that I can handle similar cases more efficiently later on”. But that’s not the goal in the scrum sprint; the goal is simply what the user story says.

So it is more desirable (from Scrum viewpoint) to simply hack something together so that the user story gets implemented, instead of trying to understand the big picture and creating something more generic (which, of course, takes more time initially).

Is this unavoidable? Have I misunderstood something? How do you combine Scrum’ing an actual product with creating something reusable at the same time? Is reusability old-fashioned and overrated?

Answer 1

Generally if you create generic solution without actual need for it you are not following agile approach. You should avoid refactoring in advance. Otherwise it is gold plating where you are adding functionality which is not needed and which is not required by your customer at the moment (priority approach).

But sometimes it can be needed to create reusable component. This usually happens when more than one team plans to use the same component or when custom framework is created separately. In SCRUM you can do this in following approach. The main project which will use the component will become product owner for the component. It will define features which are needed as user stories. Component team will implement those features and provide the component to the main team in the iterative way.

So suppose that you have two projects which expects that they will need component for credit card payments. These two teams collect user stories with priorities and provides them to component team. They will plan together delivery so that component team provides only functionality needed by main teams in current sprint.