Agile Project Management with Scrum

Chapter 4. Bringing Order from Chaos

In software development organizations, chaos often results when a project’s complexity is greater than its managers’ ability to direct meaningful progress toward a goal. Progress might be made in fits and starts, but it is often indiscernible and unsatisfactory. Scrum cuts through this kind of complexity and wrests order from chaos. It does so by enabling a team to organize itself, which allows a particularly productive order to emerge. Let’s visit several organizations to look at them before Scrum, to see how Scrum brought order to their projects, and to then generalize some practices from the experiences of these organizations. In these examples, we’ll see the power of time-boxing to instill the art of the ...