In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Henrik Kniberg talks about 10 possible reasons to fail while doing Scrum and XP. Maybe the team does not have a definition of what Done means to them, or they don't know what their velocity is, or they don't hold retrospectives.
Watch: 10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP (1h 28min)
Henrik's 10 reasons to fail while doing Scrum are:
- Believing the hype. Someone might believe that Agile is something magic.
- Definition of Done. There are problems when developers don't have a definition of Done, or they know it but they don't obey it. An example for Done is:
• Unit/Integration tested
• Ready for acceptance test
• Deployed on demo server - Velocity. Some of the issues related to velocity: not knowing about it, not using it or misusing it.
- Retrospectives. Some teams do not hold retrospectives at the end of a sprint or no improvement proposals are made.
- Team commitment. The team might be under pressure to deliver, or they are under committing or over committing.
- Technical debt. Accumulating technical debt over time or ignoring it has a serious negative impact on a project.
- Teamwork. Members in a team should not work like they are by themselves.
- Product backlog. If the product owner does not keep a product backlog, the project will develop chaotically and unpredictably.
- Mergophobia. Code merging is not done regularly.
- Sprint backlog/task-board. A team without a sprint backlog does not have a clear view of the work to be done.