why would you use scrum?

So far I have seen many reason for why an organization should start doing scrum over waterfall.
They all ultimately nail down to some of these:

• Frustration
• Not able to meet deadline
• Increased stress towards the end of the project.
• Software with nice to have features but has almost nil business value.
• Historical failure in the project

3 days back I have started with my new assignment and was very excited for working for one of the big B in the industry. Again from what I learned from job description and then during the interview process,was promising too.

Now since I am insider here, I know some of the ground reality. Here is the few comments that I heard on very first day, as reason for choosing scrum methodology for my current project.

• This project was in planning phase since last 18 month and we never had something concrete which can be shown to upper management.
• No one know about project requirements and after searching little bit, we found scrum as the only methodology which allows us to work without requirement.
• We don't have any process or discipline and scrum is the only possible ad hoc way to do this

After hearing all this, it might sounds frustrating but the silver light here is that: team is really interested in trying this new methodology and they do believe in making things done. People are open for trying new things and learning.

So here is what I am thinking of doing

• Introduce TDD and BDD(yes they aren't doing it either)
  
• Scrum training for team and upper management (session as well as on the job demonstration)
• Pairing with each member for getting them up to the speed (Playing red-green-refactor game)
• Re-structuring project solution and refactoring overall architecture.
• Introducing SRP, DI, IoC to the team.
• Start using structuremap, NAnt, MSTest, Resharper, RhinoMock

Well, best of luck Mahendra! Hope you can make difference.

finally, Jeffrey is the great guy. I owe all these learning to him, which I am going to implement here. Hey Jeff, its party time for you. Your teaching is paying off here :)