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As a scrum team I want to make use of services, so that all necessary knowledge, skills, and resources are at my disposal, without having to know everything myself and still ensuring my independence.
One of the core values of scrum is for teams to be autonomous and independent, to have the knowledge, skills and resources to do ‘everything that is needed’. But, everything is quite a lot…
In practice, I find all too often that the independence of a team – the “doing it all by ourselves” – becomes one of the predominant team targets and by doing so forgetting that autonomy is the consequence of the real, underlying precondition, namely independence.
A scrum team can (must!) put demands on activities which it places outside of the team. These demands relate to quality, timeliness and cost of the product to be delivered, and are justified by the aforementioned independence.
Security testing is a good example of testing activities, that are often outsourced by a scrum team. It requires specialist knowledge, that is usually not abundantly present in a team. By clear conditions upfront with regards to lead time, costs and content of the security test, the team can guarantee that the security criteria in the DoD are met and still remain in control of the deliverables.
I’ve seen several teams put this method already in practice: the security test for an app has been conducted as a service by Sogeti, another team used services in setting up test automation and a third team reduced the number of test cases by half using Sogeti’s service based on model-based testing.
Through the use of smart services, a scrum team still has all specialist knowledge, skills and resources at its disposal, while maintaining its independence.
