“Scrum Is The Box That XP Comes In.”

“Scrum is the box that XP comes in.” 🎁

I love this quote Tim Ottinger shared during the meetup “Five Things Scrum Masters Should Know About XP,” which Fortune Buchholtz initiated and organized as part of The Liberators Network.

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland purposefully omitted (XP’s) technical practices to simplify the framework’s organizational adoption. This doesn’t mean they can’t be combined, though.

As mentioned in the Scrum Guide:

“Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices.”

Extreme Programming (XP) is an Agile software development methodology introduced by Kent Beck in the late 1990s. It emerged as a response to traditional software development methodologies, often resulting in lengthy development cycles and rigid processes. Beck and other software development thought leaders, such as Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries, formulated XP based on their collective experiences in software development projects.

XP emphasizes values such as simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. It aims to deliver high-quality software that meets customer requirements flexibly and adaptively. It promotes close collaboration between developers and customers and iterative development, continuous testing, and incremental releases.

Throughout its history, Extreme Programming has evolved and adapted to suit various project contexts and industry needs. It has influenced the broader Agile movement and remains a popular methodology for teams seeking to deliver software quickly while focusing on quality and customer satisfaction.

Reasons for Scrum practitioners to dig deeper into XP are:

✅ XP complements Scrum with engineering practices; they match great!
✅ Both emphasize customer collaboration and rapid feedback.
✅ Continuous improvement is central to XP and aligns with Scrum’s principles.
✅ Scrum Masters can leverage XP practices like pair programming for team enhancement.
✅ Integrating XP into Scrum workflows facilitates the delivery of high-quality software.

To put it differently, I can’t imagine a Scrum team that develops a software product NOT using XP practices like TDD, CD/CI, and Pair Programming. 🤷‍♂️

A thought-provoking consideration for Scrum practitioners would be: Who needs Sprint when you continuously release new product versions? According to Tim, many XP practitioners stopped using iterations because they have CD/CI fully up and running. Instead, they focus on a continuous flow of value to expand the product and support customers.

So, whenever you hear someone say that Scrum can’t be combined with XP (or Kanban, DevOps, etc), they’re wrong. It’s a perfect match! 👌