Re: Scrum and RUP

Hi everybody,

--- "Adriano Comai" <comai@xxxx> wrote:
> having been involved in many RUP customizations, I think RUP_Scrum makes
> sense (much more, in my opinion, than RUP-XP).
> RUP needs _exactly_ the Scrum practices to become agile.

I think it makes sense as long as you "want" to continue to use RUP.
If you "just" want to implement an agile, effective ecosystem (in the
Highsmith' sense) I think you can leave RUP to those who prefer to
have a plan that they will never respect :-)

I know this statement might sound a fundamentalist one but I will try
to explain why I think so (after years of effective RUP implementations!):

RUP is fundamentally a very, very big framework you can (must!)
customize to meet your needs. In the very first months of
customization you usually spend your time cutting off things, docs,
tasks, etc, etc from the RUP framework.

This is because of the intent of RUP: to cover all the possible
situations and every aspects of every possible development effort!

After years of experience in this field if a friend of mine will ever
introduce me a new metodology/process/something_else with such a
target I would simply greet him and turn back to my work having no
time to waste.

But we are speaking about something from Booch, Jacobson and many
other "gurus", something that is so close to the (actual) management
perspective it is impossible to ignore.

Here is the point: I will no spend time to write why managers like RUP
but Scrum, like all the others Agile ecosystems, makes me think that
what managers want is something that isn't really useful to deliver
the right project and often is the first impediment to the project
success.

Why have I to spend a lot of months (before starting anything else) to
cut off things from something when I can start with the smallest
useful set of practices NOW and add, if I'll need and only if I'll
really need, others in the future?

I don't know if you have ever read something about Wolfram's work:
every time you add a rule to a system you increase the complexity of
the system itself but at a certain point adding rules do not increase
complexity anymore (sorry for simplification and for bad English :-)).
 We can infer that managing a complex system does not need an
equivalent complex method because at a certain point your effort to
simplify the system will only increase YOUR work! You will need more
work to manage YOU same work, and so on.

OK, I don't want to be (too) verbose so just a note: of course you can
successfully customize RUP to reach(?) the Scrum agility but why if
you can reach better result with a different approach? 

Happy Xmas :-D

Marco Abis - CEO & Chairman 
Agility SPI: Software Process Improvement
abis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - abis@xxxxxxx
http://agilemovement.it 


To Post a message, send it to:   scrumdevelopment@xxxxxxxxxxx
To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: 
scrumdevelopment-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxx 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/