Evolution of Challenges in the Agile/Scrum community.
At Agile Tour Dublin 2019, Fran O’Hara of Inspire Quality Services facilitated a workshop to identify participants challenges with Agile and Scrum. A similar workshop was held at Agile Tour 2014. The purpose was to analyse if and how the challenges facing the agile community had evolved over those 5 years.
Overall comparison between outputs from 2019 and 2014 workshops
In summary, there is a clear change in the nature of issues/challenges being raised in 2019 compared to 2014. There is a shift to organisational and cultural issues rather than ones that focus on the mechanics of Scrum itself.
In 2019, challenges such as budget estimation for incremental development, not adopting agile values, agile at scale, organisational structure, management/customer collaboration are the type of challenge being raised.
In 2014 challenges included challenges with user stories, the Product Owner and Scrum Master roles, backlog refinement, team issues, quality, etc.
This appears to reflect a maturing in the agile community whereby there is a recognition of the more significant issues that negatively impact on achieving higher levels of agility. The mechanics of frameworks like Scrum are important but more significant are values, behaviours and collaboration both within the team but more significantly with leadership and customers.