Thursday, October 8, 2009

"Extreme." "Agile."

Whoever inflicted these adjectives on us needs to be harshly dealt with. I guess Ron Jeffries is principally to blame for this, yes? Bad boy, Ron, no cookie.

The reason I mention this comes from discussing Scrum with an acquaintance. One of the sacred rules of Scrum is that projects are organized into short periods called sprints (originally 4 weeks, but lots of places seemed to have settled in on 2-week sprints). The deliverables for each sprint are locked in at the beginning, and they cannot be increased. Nor can the dependent requirements for the deliverables (called "stories" in Scrumese) be modified.

If "needs of the business" dictate such a change, then the only alternative is to fail the sprint. The only fair thing to do when a sprint is failed this way is to pretend the sprint never existed when measuring the dev team. However, the stakeholders should get serious demerits from failing sprints this way. Unfortunately, in practice, dev teams get demerited for failed sprints regardless of root cause. A good reason why the world will never be perfect.

The other alternative is, of course, to wait until the end of the current sprint, modify the stories, and issue new deliverables for the next sprint. We like to call that The Right Thing To Do. The only reason you'd fail a sprint instead is if the work is obviated or it's an emergency (it had better be one of those "going concern" types of emergencies, too).

My friend pointed out that this isn't very "agile". Which leads me back to why I made this post. I'm not sure Jeffries intended the word "agile" to connote "bending to every whim of the hornhairs*." But senior managers who drink the Agile Kool-Aid often think that's precisely what it means. Which is why a lot of people are having problems with Scrum.

There's nothing we can do about it now. But if Ron Jeffries comes up with a new flavor of Kool-Aid, I suggest no one let him be in charge of naming it.

* EDIT 9/OCT: Some people expressed confusion over the word "hornhair." It's a reference to the comic-strip Dilbert, by Scott Adams. A recurring character is the unnamed Big Boss. The Big Boss is balding, and his remaining hair suggests horns. Hence, "hornhair." Other people call him the "Pointy-Haired Boss" and therefore might use the word "pointy-hair" or "PHB". Definition: Ineffectual middle management suckup.

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