By Vitaly Dubravin, PMP

Scrum is a flavor of an agile software development methodology and is widely adopted by all major software shops. It cuts sharp corners of a “traditional” waterfall approach, eliminates unnecessary tensions and makes your development team very lean and efficient. I’ve started practicing Scrum several years ago when Kindle Innovations has decided to move ahead with a Facebook challenger – www.tabUp.com project. Everyone on the team had his own vision and understanding of the site to be, many ideas were similar in nature, but had “minor” differences in tactical approach. Even though our “final” scope at the beginning looked solid like a rock, we had to adapt to the Internet changing demands. TabUp today has only a few elements of the original idea and everything you see on the site is a response to the early birds and current users’ behaviors and suggestions. TabUp team got to the point where we can implement a feature within a few days from the suggestion and push it into production right away. This would be absolutely impossible to do without using Scrum.

I was so impressed by Scrum results on tabUp project that started evangelizing this approach to my other customers. Some of them had already adopted it, others are in the process of internal fighting with “natural” fears. This is what I’m going to review down below – Fears of Scrum.