Corporate Scrum is a term I use for companies that do traditional Waterfall in 30 day sprints.
Instead of blurring the roles, and making things like quality a team responsibility:
- analysts analyze
- testers test
- programmers program
- and PMs project manage
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Corporate Scrum. For many it’s a big improvement, and a necessary first step into Agile.
But once teams get the basics of Scrum planning, they should look for opportunities to broaden their skills, and discover their natural abilities, and play more than just one role on projects (for example The Automated Tester).
The Agile Warrior 
Feb 02, 2014 @ 20:15:18
I agree that it may be an improvement, a necessary first step into Agile, etc. That does not mean there is nothing ‘inherently wrong’ there.
IMHO, if your dev team is doing Scrum without automated testing, my firend, you better be playing rugby.
Feb 17, 2014 @ 12:42:10
“IMHO, if your dev team is doing Scrum without automated testing, my friend, you better be playing rugby.”
So…beautiful…
Feb 03, 2014 @ 00:02:31
The diagram is so true 🙂 Obviously it would be nice to be able to do as you said, and everyone in the team would love to try. However in my opinion it’s not applicable for the existing huge products generating high business value, on which every single small change should be planed & implemented & verified carefully and professionally. Besides, on the enterprise management side, unfortunately autonomy isn’t a good thing, as when the troubles happen it’s very confusing to tell exactly which part is whose responsibility. Automated Testing? Something like that is cool but not the key to autonomy for every company
Feb 03, 2014 @ 13:18:03
This is exactly how scrum felt for the very first release in my organization. Obviously not ideal, but I agree that it probably was a necessary stepping stone. Change is always difficult, so I think there is value in “softening the blow” with a hybrid approach, provided that it only ever is a temporary crossover into proper scrum…
Feb 03, 2014 @ 13:46:41
Feb 06, 2014 @ 14:07:47
That’s exactly how we did it when we started using scrum about 6 years ago. Since then, we have had several of the more mature teams move to more of the whole team approach. Unfortunately, we still have some “teams” (and I use the world loosely) that continue in this corporate scrum model. I don’t think they know how to move to the next level.
Feb 06, 2014 @ 15:04:21
That has been my experience too Alyssa.
Change is hard. And until people have a real incentive to change, I find most of us won’t.
Some people get this stuff (love it, thrive in it, and are fearless).
Others resist. Want to protect their turf. And have interests else where.
No right or wrong. Just is. The beauty is we all get to decide which side of the fence we would rather play on.
Appreciate the comment.
Cheers – Jonathan
Feb 17, 2014 @ 10:38:56
I call it mini waterfall or scrum-fall http://watirmelon.com/2013/12/11/five-signs-youre-not-agile-youre-actually-mini-waterfall/
Corporate Scrum | Development Block
Feb 26, 2014 @ 14:42:42