My previous post, XP revival, dealt with the positive trend around XP as a project methodology. I explicitly stated that adding Craftsmanship practices on top of Scrum does not mean that you’re doing XP. In this post I am going to answer the explicit request to elaborate more on that topic.  It is a well-known fact that Scrum prescribes no engineering practice, leaving teams choosing the ones they see fit. A strategy that led more often than not to what Martin Fowler coined as flaccidscrum, projects which velocity drops to a halt. This situation also contributed to the birth  of the Software Craftsmanship movement, which aims at raising the bar for code engineering practices. It also stresses out that a coder must make those practices his own responsibility.
Continue reading “Scrum + Craftsmanship != XP” →