Pros and Cons of Scrum Development

SCRUM

Scrum is a popular development approach which practices how to manage project development activities. It also keeps up with the current trends while delivering high quality outputs in a short period of time but what makes Scrum development popular? Let's go about its pros and cons.

Pros of Scrum

• Adaptive to changes

  • Comparing scrum to traditional waterfall, scrum is capable of being flexible to change. Using waterfall, it is difficult to go back and make changes once it passes each stage of development. It is designed to create pre-planning and to follow a controlled flow conditions. Where as in scrum, in each process it performs it is independent from one another and doesn't affect progress. It is designed to respond to changes and fast phase conditions.

• Ensures time is used effective in development

  • During sprint meeting the team evaluates and considers the estimated amount of time it requires to develop a task. Through allocating time clearly for every task will allow the team to work productively while being organized.

• Progressive improvements is practiced

  • During sprint meeting the team uses Retrospect Sprint to identify what should be KEEP that helped in the course of the sprint, the PROBLEM that was encountered during the sprint and what they should TRY to improve for the upcoming new sprint. Identifying these will make sure that cooperation with the team will be more effective.

• Display clear goal and results

  • Daily scrum meeting allows the whole team to track the progress of everyone's assignment. It also establish a transparency and gives everyone an understanding on what is the problem, solutions and result in every sprint.

Cons of Scrum

• Indecisive changes
  • At times client will ask the team to add extra functionality in the project, only to have it removed and have it added again later. Scrum is able to adapt to changes however it also imposes the amount of time it was need to be develop. And may cause delays in more prior task that were already planned.
• Team member leaves half way in the project
  • It has a negative impact on the project's progress. When a member leaves half way and there are task that are not accomplished in the current sprint. It will take a toll on the team since it affects the distributed task to each member. Adjustments will have to be made and modifications on how to approach the changes of the sudden disruption will have to be considered. This is the rigidity side of scrum.
• A great number of members in a single team
  • As mention above the decrease in number of people in the team affects progress but as well as having too much number of people in a team will also bring a negative impact on the project's progress. It will not be as effective as the appropriate size in a scrum team will be. It will lose the benefits of keeping up to the alloted time for daily scrum and it managing the whole team. It is wiser to follow the recommended size for a single team or splitting the large team into 2 or more teams.

Conclusion

To sum it up, Scrum is an effective development approach that addresses the fast changing of technology. The development approach continuous feedback from client which ensures that the end product of it brings satisfaction to them. Along the changing of technology, scrum is able to react fast to changes and implement it to the project to keep up with it. It also has its pitfalls but with proper preparation and management, it can cope and pull through with it's problems.