Natalia Jalušić at JavaCro'23: How we adapted Scrum to meet our needs

Have you ever been in a start-up with a small team where everything just worked? Everyone was on the same page and knew what was going on. But the company started to grow and you started to see problems that weren’t there before. That’s when you heard about Scrum, and it sounded like the perfect solution. You read the Scrum Guide and thought you were ready to implement it, but it didn’t take long to realize that the ideal Scrum team from the book was very different from the real Scrum team at your company. You understood that you could not just copy-paste Scrum; you needed to adapt it to your own needs. And then came the most challenging part – figuring out what to keep and what to change while preserving the essence of Scrum, without creating a mutated framework that was Scrum only in its name.

This is how our Scrum Master Natalia Jalušić shaped the story of our journey and experience with Scrum, the most widespread framework for agile development. Titled “How we implemented Scrum”, Natalia’s speech was on the agenda of JavaCro, the esteemed annual conference of developers held in Rovinj, Croatia in mid-October.

Natalia Jalušić had some company at the conference too – our colleagues Nino Magić, Valentina Krhlanko, Darko Gajić, and Kristijan Oberling were all in attendance.

Ever since it rose to prominence at the turn of the millennium, Scrum became probably the most accepted system for agile project management. It gave software companies principles for managing and scaling dev teams, responding to customer needs faster, building better products, and much more.

Natalia described our implementation journey – how we started, what obstacles we faced, what immediately proved effective, what we saw as long-term losses, and what we considered as gains. Dev process in our organization is complex, given that we build many interconnected products for the automotive industry. While we are still fine-tuning our Scrum implementation, we can say that we’ve established a good process that works well, she said at the conference.

There was a lot of nodding in the audience - signs of recognition - when Natalia spoke about challenges we faced. That was not surprising, as many organizations are looking to carve their own Scrum implementation, which is not an easy task, and similar types of problems are likely to pop out along the way. Sharing and hearing real experiences is of great value, Natalia said.

After the presentation, Natalia took questions from the audience. Some contributors showed skepticism towards the effectiveness of Scrum, while others shared benefits they’ve seen from this framework. - We heard different perspectives, sparked some laughter with Jerry Seinfeld jokes, and shared experiences in a great atmosphere. All in all, I think the session was informative and useful, Natalia concluded.