Scrum For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7

Inspect and Adapt: How to Correct Your Course

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the feedback loop

Maintaining transparency and correcting the course

Dealing with antipatterns and external forces

Establishing a culture of innovation

Often during product development, you find your product in a different place from what you expected. In this chapter, we explore how scrum facilitates continuous learning and improvement. We also look at how you can work in the presence of uncertainty instead of hoping you can plan it away. After all, being agile is learning and adjusting as you go — being flexible enough to build the best product with the right features and quality.

Need for Certainty

Management’s need for certainty of outcomes may well drive the downward spiral or decay of many products and great ideas. They could refuse to accept the basic reality of uncertainty, settling for the relative safety of the known at the expense of the better. The power of empiricism is being okay with uncertainty until you’ve learned the information you need to have more certainty about the outcome ...