Question

We have proposed to use Scrum in our IT Project and our Adviser asks us if it is appropriate to us because we are still amateurs.

Is it appropriate to us Scrum even if we are amateurs?

Answer 1

The discussion is usually agile vs. waterfall, right? I am linking an article, but it is in Portuguese, so I’ll try to transmit some of its ideas:

Waterfall is like chess. You think and plan a lot, try to foresee every possible issue as soon as possible. There’s a lot of planning, but makes sense only on stable and well-known domains, where change isn’t much expected.

Agile is like soccer (or many collective sports): decisions are made in-game and should be done fast. There’s no much time to analyze every consequence. It is “ideal” for dynamic and unstable domains, where change is always expected (web applications, for instance, tend to fall in this category). Another point to note is: even if you have the best players, if they don’t do well as a team, you won’t be the winner.

IMHO, Scrum would be useful, because:

• Once every two weeks (or every month, depending on iteration time) you’ll be able to see what’s working or not. And this is very valuable, specially as an “amateur” team, which is expected to be learning and finding things out much more constantly.
• As amateurs, you probably won’t be able to foresee everything (and that’s something agile embraces)
• There’s more space for sharing experience (stand-up meeting, retrospective, and even planning meeting). And you share REAL experience (you must write code every week rather than just plan)