Scope of this Blog

When organizations start thinking of implementing a new method, this means they are not happy with the way things are currently going. The discontent may stem from:

• too little process, causing chaos and misunderstanding;
• a very rigid process, causing people to feel constrained and hindered in effectively doing their job;
• a lack of timely feedback and focus on working software in the process, causing dissatisfied customers and overruns in delivery;
• too much pressure on the team and measures like working overtime, causing concessions to software quality and maintainability and dissatisfied team members.

Scrum, XP and RUP are methods that have all earned their place in the software development world. Scrum is an extremely lightweight Agile team-management approach. Scrum provides a simple process and visual tools for self-organization and it fosters team and customer involvement. XP encompasses a set of day to day practices for improving software quality and responding to change. XP helps the team to maintain a stable changeable product. RUP provides an extensive process, guiding teams on a wide variety of aspects of iterative software development. Its method content provides a rich vocabulary to talk about improvement.

What we will show in this blog is that organizations do not have to choose between Scrum, XP or RUP. They can be very effectively used together, complementing each other with their specific views on the complexity of developing IT-solutions.

What we present is not the way you should do software development but a basis on which you could build your own tailored process. We have taken Scrum as our leading self-organization approach and added the day to day specialist practices from XP and the phases and a collection of practices from RUP. We put them together into a consistent process and augmented the mindset needed to implement these practices. The purpose of this blog is to share experiences and give you some background on them so you can successfully use them in your own work. It is your job as the user of any process to further tailor it to fit your needs, experiment with it and incorporate your experiences.