The common ingredient behind software success

As a Certified Scrum Master, I continually re-assess how to best apply Scrum principles to deliver software projects. One of my main criticisms of Scrum is that it is often misunderstood and sold as a panacea for bad software practices. It seems dev managers want to believe that Scrum will allow them to extract stellar results from poor and mediocre performers.

What a real Scrum looks like:

(Photo by flickr user boocal used under a Creative Commons license.)

In my experience, the only common ingredient to all successful projects is: strong software developers. Scrum (or any other software methodology) is no substitute for solid software fundamentals (such as strong object-oriented design skills).

Katie Lucas expresses this more eloquently. Her entire post is worth reading for anyone in the software profession.

Every methodology I’ve come across has, at its kernel, a very small section labelled “do magic here.”

[A software methodology is sometimes] pushed as a way of getting normal people to do something normal people can’t do. Normal people can’t do OO design properly. I don’t mean that derogatively as such. I can’t draw still life, I can’t run 100m races…People have various different talents. One of those talents is doing OO design and some people just can’t do it. No matter how much paperwork you surround it with.

And at the core of [a software methodology] is a small area where you have to use OO design talents…. if you don’t have them, it’s like having a methodology for running the 100m.

“Step 1: write about running really fast. Step 2: Go and draw a plan of the racetrack. Step 3: go and buy really tight lycra shorts. Step 4: run really, really, really fast. Step 5: cross line first”

It’s that step 4 that’s the tough one. But if you put lots of emphasis on 1,2,3 and 5 it’s possible no-one will notice and then you could probably make a lot of money selling the methodology to would-be
athletes who think there’s some “secret” to being a 100m runner over and above being born with the ability to run fast.