Interviewer:
How do Gantt charts work with scrum?
Mr. Agile®:
Gantt charts are just a visualization, so I think many times people think that this is in conflict with agile techniques. Gantt charts are just how you want to visualize data and they may or may not be appropriate under a scrum model. What isn’t appropriate under a scrum model is critical path; where you’re doing big design up front, you come up with a fixed set amount of requirements, now you’re going to blow out tasks associated with every one of those requirements, you’re going to link up a bunch of dependencies between those tasks and then you’re just going to assume that the world is going to remain static. This is actually a colossal waste of time and so oftentimes when people are talking about Gantt charts what they’re really talking about is they sat down, they blown out the entire project, they’ve linked it all together and now they’re visualizing it. This is what we want to avoid doing under a scrum model. We want reality to drive what is our next decision.
