What is Trans-Scrum?

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There is the well established notion of what Scrum-But is. There is also a clear definition of Scrum – although people still argue if someone is doing Scrum or his process is only Scrumish. But more or less, territory is known. At least in the two dimensions, black and white about Scrum or not-Scrum.

After many years of Scrum people have inspected and adapted for many iterations. Additionally the current increase in lean and Kanban adoption engulfs many Scrum projects. Developers are using Scrum together with XP and some believe you are more successfully and productive when using XP practices together with Scrum.

There is no term describing these efforts. People who have moved beyond Scrum-by-the-book, adapted lean values, moved to flow and continuous deployments and who have perhaps dropped some of their Scrum practices (LINK mein blog) like iteration reviews, what should they call their process? Strong Scrum enthusiasts would say don’t call it Scrum at all. Call your process agile or lean. But with iterations, a ScrumMaster, ProductOwner and story point estimation, this sounds too weak and doesn’t reflect the still strong Scrum base of the practice.

I suggest calling these processes Trans-Scrum. This term is for people who still believe in Scrum and have adopted Scrum successfully, not those who dropped the effort for whatever reason (and this is fine!). As long as Scrum and the values of Scrum are the base of your process, you’re Trans-Scrum.

This would help communication between people, talking about processes and sharing knowledge and wisdom. I often struggle expressing myself what we do here. This is difficult because when you, as a Trans-Scrumer, tell people you do Scrum they get the wrong impression. If you tell them you don’t do Scrum, they also get the wrong impression. Even more if you tell them – who would? – you do Scrum-But? [1]

Only when you move beyond that, what some surely will as they adapt even more to their context, start calling your process something else.

What would you call this process? Scrum 2.0? Scrum++?

[1] The difference between Scrum-But and Trans-Scrum is, in the Toyota sense, that you’ve done practices in Trans-Scrum and after learning you’ve dropped them as not necessary. While with Scrum-But you don’t do these practices from the start because you think they don’t work for you.

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