This week, I will discuss the subject that was recently discussed in class. The topic is “Scrum”, understanding its purpose, application, and limitations compared to Agile. Understanding the specifics of Scrum can enhance teamwork within projects, particularly in software development, where it is a widely utilized project management approach.

The information I researched offered a detailed explanation of the factors that could lead to the failure of Scrum. An essential realization was that following Scrum rules without adapting them to a team’s specific needs could result in too much inflexibility. This really affected me because I have seen situations where teams got stuck in processes and forgot the main objective: delivering value to customers. It caused me to think about past projects in which team members prioritized adhering to protocols over achieving the end goal of creating a useful, practical product. The resource I examined offered a detailed explanation of the factors contributing to the possible downfall of Scrum. One crucial finding was that adhering strictly to Scrum guidelines without adapting them to suit a team’s specific needs could result in too much rigidity. This had a significant effect on me as I have seen situations where teams got stuck in processes, ignoring the main objective of delivering value to customers. It led me to think about past projects where team members prioritized following procedures over delivering a successful, useful end product.

I found out that Scrum offers a structured way of working, but its success depends on teams embracing Agile principles, not just following a set of tasks. The article pointed out that even the best-designed Scrum plans may fail if team members lack commitment or the necessary skills. This has emphasized the significance of establishing a solid team environment in which every member is valued and motivated to take part. The article also delved into how focusing too much on Scrum practices could result in unnecessary bureaucracy, hindering efficiency and restricting innovation.

I chose this blog because I plan to incorporate these lessons by promoting a culture of flexibility in my team. I intend to prioritize the Agile principles of collaboration, customer focus, and adaptability over strictly adhering to Scrum methodologies in our process. Regularly meeting with the team to evaluate our advancement and adaptability will be of utmost importance. Effective communication will allow us to adapt our strategies according to the project’s objectives and the team’s abilities.

Reflecting on the Scrum blog, I discovered its thoughts on the restrictions of the framework to be very informative. It highlighted how sticking strictly to Scrum may impede success, underscoring the need for flexibility. This mirrored my own experiences, as a lack of flexibility frequently resulted in difficulties. I discovered that emphasizing teamwork and transparent communication is essential for providing value. In the future, I intend to foster a flexible culture among my team, consistently communicating to ensure our practices are in line with our goals. This research has enhanced my comprehension of Agile methods and emphasized the importance of flexibility and dedication in project management.

Blog URL: https://medium.com/better-programming/why-scrum-fails-ac92cab05c6a

From the blog CS@Worcester – Matchaman10 by tam nguyen and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Blog Title: Aligning Product-Driven Organizations with Customer Experience: Key Insights

This week, I listened to a podcast titled “How to Align Your Product-Driven Organization to the Customer Experience.”  The episode goes into and explores the challenges that product-driven companies face in ensuring their offerings truly meet customer needs. It explains in detail how organizations can align internal processes and product development strategies in concert with the overall customer experience and emphasizes the importance of both understanding and responding to customer feedback throughout the product life cycle.

The host starts off by discussing the gap that often exists between a company’s internal product focus and what customers actually want. They explain how organizations can get caught up in their own innovations, losing sight of customer pain points. The podcast stresses the need for continuous customer engagement, using both qualitative feedback and quantitative data to drive product decisions. They also highlight the role of cross-functional collaboration, urging teams across departments to work together to create products that not only function well but also deliver real value to users.

I chose this podcast because it directly relates to our course discussions on systems thinking and customer-centric design, both of which are crucial in software development. This points to a greater and broad development process: aligning internal systems with customer’s needs externally. More particularly, I felt that the guest speaker has done a very good job in bridging the gap between product innovations and customer satisfaction, a very crucial gap in most of the tech-driven industries today, including software development.

The one important thing I took from the episode has to do with how significant it is to assess products from a customer’s perspective. This is something that up until this point I had considered in terms of features against functionality. In this podcast, it helped me understand how important it would be to always reassess if those features actually impact the user experience. I also liked the talk about cross functional teams because it helped me confirm that successful collaboration among different departments brings much better results for any product. 

With my understanding now, using what I’ve learned can be used to integrate  into my approach to project work. Whether it’s in software development or product management, understanding the customer’s journey will be key to delivering value. I now see the importance of continuous feedback loops and how integrating customer experience into every phase of development can lead to better, more successful products. This episode has given me a fresh perspective on how to bridge the gap between product design and customer satisfaction, and I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned in future team projects.

Link to Podcast: How to Align Your Product-Driven Organization to the Customer Experience

From the blog CS@Worcester – Harley Philippe's Tech Journal by Harley Philippe and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Article URL: https://clickup.com/blog/scrum-master/

The article chosen, written by the PMO Team, group responsible for moving the needle across various projects at ClickUp, discusses the vital job of a Scrum Master lies in promoting teamwork, eliminating roadblocks, and making sure execution of Agile principles to achieve successful project management !! The article is called “How to Become a Scrum Master: Skills, Tools, and Tips”; in essence, examines the duties and significance of a Scrum Master. The Scrum Master promotes dialogue among stakeholders, the product owner, and the development team while emphasizing the aim of constant enhancement. I personally was interested in this article as it applies to the agile methodology. Agile has been a topic of discussion in our lectures in the past couple of weeks and has been greatly employed in our POGIL activities. To add on to the Scrum Master lesson we had this past week, it was pivotal to come to an understanding of how all this applies together.

I chose this resource because it offers a thorough and understandable summary of the Scrum Master’s responsibilities, which is in line with my studies on Agile techniques and project management in CS-348. I found the article to be very helpful in helping me better grasp Scrum and other Agile methods because it breaks out details of the role in a straightforward way. 

I could relate to the blog post’s topic on a number of levels. I had some misconceptions regarding the function of the Scrum Master, which it cleared up first. I had kind of thought of the Scrum Master as the team’s “administrative” position before reading this. But the article made clear how much more dynamic this position is, needing the person to be a servant + leader who continually strikes a balance between the team’s requirements and productivity while preserving Agile principles. The focus on the Scrum Master as a facilitator rather than ‘traditional’ manager was what really caught my attention. The differentiation matters because it shows how the Scrum Master, instead of assigning tasks, enables the team to self-organize. With this discovery, my perspective on leadership in Agile settings has completely changed. I now see that good leadership is about empowering people to perform at their highest level, not about having control over them.

This resource has taught me that becoming a Scrum Master is more than just knowing the fundamentals of Scrum. It also involves combining soft skills like empathy and communication. This understanding will change the way I handle Agile project management from now on. For example, I now see how crucial it is to maintain a collaborative atmosphere where team members feel motivated and ready to take responsibility for their work. In order to create a positive team environment, I will continue to work on cultivating my assistance techniques and look for roadblocks that might prevent development.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Just A Girl in STEM by Joy Kimani and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week, I am going to discuss some of the benefits of the output-oriented software development methodologies we have been studying in class, like Scrum and Agile. I have built many projects both on my own and for my career from the ground up, which is where the value of these methodologies is most apparent to me. The blog post I will be referencing throughout this discussion can be found here. This post provides an in-depth overview of the Agile methodology, including lower-level analysis of different stages of the process, benefits and purposes of each stage, and various best practices for different stages. I chose this post because it correctly emphasizes the importance the Agile methodology places on continuous delivery, which is something that has been a cornerstone for me in various projects.

A project that comes to mind is actually the same project I discussed in this week’s post for CS-343. A friend came to me and asked for something way above my skill level, and it was daunting to imagine planning out the whole project and implementing/deploying some large framework in any reasonable amount of time. If I hadn’t remembered something an old professional connection had said to me years prior, I don’t think I ever could have known where to start: “your code has to exist before it can be made better.” I think that is what the heart of these continuous delivery methodologies is really about, and it really is a true statement for many reasons. The first, which this blog touches on and which we have discussed briefly in class, is that your perspective will always be better or wider after the work is started. Another reason that statement holds true, and perhaps the most practical reason (at least in my case), is that half the time, I don’t even know what I am doing when I start. It would be impossible for me to design anything, because I don’t know anything. For me, learning my way through a project is almost all the fun, and that is not really an option without methodologies like Scrum and Agile, even if I don’t know I’m using them. This blog post discusses release management a lot, which is not so applicable to personal projects, but I think it connects nicely if you compare a release to a checkpoint or successful implementation of a new feature. In my project, as I built it, I started with: what. Then, I said, I guess I could try that. Then, I implemented a single shoddy feature. I saw my feature and saw a way to make it better. Compound that a hundred times, and I had a full framework that I had approached incrementally, following Agile principles and release management without even knowing it. I think that is a testament to the elegance of these continuous delivery oriented methodologies, and I will more consciously follow these principles moving forward.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Mr. Lancer 987's Blog by Mr. Lancer 987 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In this post, I will be discussing some basic concepts about abstraction in object-oriented programming. The resource I reference can be found here. I chose this topic because in the first few group activities, I was made aware that I had forgotten some of the key differences between kinds of abstraction (at least in Java), such as the difference between an abstract class and an interface. Though we reviewed these differences in class, I wanted to continue to find specific examples that would allow me to better understand the concept. Abu’s blog post briefly explains what abstraction in object-oriented programming is, some of its benefits/purposes, and some elementary examples of how to implement (no pun intended) abstract classes and interfaces.

The largest point of note I want to discuss is the benefit of modularity when abstraction is implemented. I recently finished up a personal coding project, in which modular development was a necessity. The project involved a central framework capable of ingesting a very specific kind of data from different websites, but each of the websites had a different way of providing that data. The most efficient answer I could think of was to make the central framework independent of the websites themselves, and to make it deal only with the data after it was obtained. I then created a module for each website that held the data, and implemented whatever logic I needed to in order to get the data and pass it to the central framework. I used Python for this project, but in hindsight, I may have been better suited to implement an object-oriented programming language like Java. Each module could have been a concrete class that extends some abstract class Parser, as each of my parser modules in my Python project used the same methods anyways. Each module had a get_url_and_interactions() function, a get_parse_function() function, and an stm() function (we can leave that abstract for now). It would have been very simple to use an object-oriented programming language, as I could have abstracted what it means to be a parser.

Now, this worked fine; since I was the only developer on the project, and had full visibility over all of the code, I didn’t need to check if a module implemented, for example, the get_url_and_interactions() function. I knew that it did. Moving forward, if I were coding more collaboratively with anyone else, or even if I just wanted to code according to some better practices moving forward, I could have used abstraction to standardize the parsers to ensure they all implemented certain methods or functions.

Though a little cliche, I do think it is very nice and elegant that the same thing can be accomplished in so many different ways. I think it is a good metaphor for most problems worth solving.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Mr. Lancer 987's Blog by Mr. Lancer 987 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.