ScrumBUT is an interesting term for a Scrum team. I have met a lot of Scrum team that has never been performance team because of this thought “Agile and especially Scrum normally welcome the changes, Scrum itself is just a framework so we always need to modify it to work for us”. This idea doesn’t seem wrong because Scrum provides the method that helps the team finds it best process itself; but modifying Scrum before the team totally own it seems a bad idea. Because Scrum is very simple and a minimise framework, the team should follow Scrum guide for being stable before thinking about adjustment. Remember, the adjustments just bring the best values while the team owns Scrum to deep understand which is suitable for it. And please adjust, don’t modify it.
ScrumBUT is practicing Scrum without following Scrum guide:
“We use Scrum BUT we don’t have Daily Scrum”
“We use Scrum BUT we do Sprint Retrospective for 5 hours”
ScrumBUT of course isn’t recommended by the Scrum organizations. In my opinion, practicing Scrum or ScrumBUT doesn’t matter, if it can bring the good values. But the important thing is: Is the team aware of practicing Scrum or ScrumBUT? The team practices ScrumBUT because of ability of following Scrum guide or adjustment need? Is there any reason, evidence shows that practicing ScrumBUT brings more values? If these questions are well answered, ScrumBUT brings more values and it should be recommended. But, practicing ScrumBUT without deep understand about Scrum is normally a pitfall, be careful.
If there are many BUT, the team isn’t practicing ScumBUT; it’s following another process that might unrelated to Scrum. Then why does the team need Scrum? It happens in 2 cases: or team has high knowledge and practice to give another method (there are few teams); or the team in “Scrum beginning” period.
Somebody talks to me “my team is practicing Scrum because we have daily standup meeting”. “No, you don’t practice Scrum, you just practice only 1 Scrum event. It isn’t ScrumBUT as well”.
