Liberty and Justice for all...Happy Independence Day!

 

"Liberty is the quality or state of being free; the power to do as one pleases; freedom from physical restraint; freedom from arbitrary or despotic control; the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges; the power of choice."

—Webster's Dictionary

 

“Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny...Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government...Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people...A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”

—Thomas Jefferson

 

“Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

—Benjamin Franklin

 

“...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

—John F. Kennedy

Death to the Product Backlog!

This week, our Client Services department is adopting Scrum, and it is already working wonders in our design department. As I work with these teams to assist in their Scrum education, one phrase keeps coming back to me time and time again: "Death to the Product Backlog!"

Now, I know this is a rather odd stance for a Certified SrumMaster, but it is necessary, so I shall proceed.

In Ken Schwaber's paper What is Scrum?, he defines the methodology as...

"...a simple set of practices and rules that encompasses the transparency, inspection, and adaptation requirements inherent in empirical process control."

Both the Scrum Alliance and Ken's site, Controlled Chaos, add...

"Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work."

The kicker lies in those last three words.

If we are to truly use Scrum as a management methodology—as opposed to a engineering or development methodology—then there is no product, only a list of tasks to be completed.

With this in mind, I hereby propose that the Product Backlog be renamed Project Backlog.

Additionally, that rule about each sprint producing deliverable product seems counter to "managing any work" as well. I submit that the Sprint Goal or Objective agreed upon in each planning meeting solves the same problem this rule sets out to accomplish, therefore the redundant deliverable code rule should also be put to death—finally allowing everyone to manage anything with Scrum.

Afterall, it is the transparency, self-management, team-accountability and trust, (coupled with inspection and adaption) that make Scrum work. None of these require a product—just identifiable and deliverable tasks that support one goal.

Now, who's with me on this? Do we need a petition? What are our next steps to correcting this oversight? Maybe, we could start an Americanized version of Scrum. Yes—that's it!—we could call it Huddle. What do you think?

'The Secret' defeats irrefutable laws of programming

In management, John C. Maxwell says there is no silver bullet that will tackle all of the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. In the development world, we are a bit luckier.

Rhonda Byrne, in her best-selling books and DVDs, says the Secret to solving problems is controlling the Law of Attraction. In the development world, the best kept secret for solving problems is a management methodology called Scrum.

In an article on Jeff Sutherland and the origins of Scrum, Jimmy Bergmark points out that Scrum was designed to address a number of development laws and theorem's, including...

Ziv's Law - Specifications will never be fully understood.

Humphrey's Law - The user will never know what they want until after the system is in production—maybe not even then.

Wegner's Lemma - An interactive system can never be fully specified nor can it ever be fully tested. (This is the software analogy to Godel's theorem in mathematics.)

Langdon's Lemma - Software evolves more rapidly as it approaches chaotic regions—while trying not to spill over into chaos.

I want to add another law to Jeff and Jimmy's list—a law that Scrum handle's better than any of those above.

Scrum is the only development process—agile or otherwise—that is capable of handling...

Murphy's Law - Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Scrum alone can't handle it, but—with a solid team—Scrum will defeat Murphy every time.