“How can you make Scrum iterative and incremental?“

One of the questions I was just asked in a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) class was “How can you make Scrum iterative and incremental?” The question was asked at the very beginning of class, before I taught anything. This one kind of threw me for a loop because Scrum is, by definition, already iterative and incremental.

What does it mean for a management approach to be iterative? When we establish a process and then we iterate on that process. We do not just use the process once, we repeat the process over and over again.

What does incremental mean? Everything that we do in a process is incrementally added to everything else that we’ve done before. We work in such a way that when we build a ‘thing’, it is going to extend the functionality of that ‘thing’. That ‘thing’ is incrementally getting bigger (and hopefully better).

So, ‘iterative’ meaning repeatable, and ‘incremental’ meaning it grows.

Back to the question, “How can we turn Scrum into an interactive and incremental approach?” This question implies Scrum is not iterative and incremental. I actually see this often enough in class that I’m ready for this question now. Usually when people are asking, they’ve experienced a usage of Scrum where their team only does a single Sprint and then they’re done. Or they do very few Sprints for a short project, and then they’re done. Or, and this is most likely, they are using Scrum to deliver a service (which will not result in incremental accumulation of added functionality).

Scrum was initially meant for product development – not necessarily project development. Product development to mean that we have a product that will never be done. We’re constantly innovating and updating this product. We are constantly adding new features and new functionality to the product. And, we are incrementally going to add those new features and functionality to the product. We are going to do this using iterative work in Scrum in Sprints (which is what we call iterations in Scrum).

So, Scrum already is iterative and incremental. So, if you are new to Scrum and you’re trying to figure out how many Sprints we are going to do … no one knows. We are going to keep sprinting until someone tells us stop working on this product, because it’s lifespan is over.

Here is a video I made on this exact subject a few years ago