While the Scrum process continues to prove itself in what it can tell us about what we do and how we’re doing it there is a cultural aspect to the implementation that is slower to show its worth. Specifically, a group of highly motivated, extremely intelligent geeks and testers aren’t inclined to view themselves as part of a team. I suppose that this isn’t a universal truism but in our shop the technical folks aren’t much up for chit-chat. They’d prefer to roll up their sleeves and solve the problem themselves. Therefore, while the metrics from Scrum are great – the collaborative team dynamic is going to evolve more slowly over time.
We grouped developers onto teams to reduce the number of communication pathways so the combination of people was somewhat arbitrary. We did attempt to spread domain expertise evenly but we didn’t have any sense of how the groupings would work out in practice. One smaller team is particularly challenged because one of the key members isn’t enthused at all about sharing what she’s doing or listening to the other team member . I find this a difficult situation to fathom because working as a team and collaborating is so essential in technology today where there is no way that a person can know everything and for sure this person doesn’t.
Building awareness and allowing the process to prove itself are slower going than I would like but there’s not much I can do but be patient for now.
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