Category: trends

Don't Use Scrum

January 19, 2009 by Janusz Marcin Gorycki

Photo (c) Janusz Gorycki

Models

Once upon a time, people believed that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it. Then Copernicus came and offered the theory that matched the observed reality better. Then Newton attempted to explain why planets revolve (among other things). Then Einstein pointed out where Newton was wrong and straightened the theory to match the needs of his contemporaries – very soon to be superseded by a bunch of crazy physicists who invented quantum mechanics. These days, we pretty much know for a fact that quantum mechanics is wrong and we are in a search for a better theory. Now, all of the above theories have a couple of things in common:

• they are purely theoretical and idealized models of the real world (yes, even the flat earth theory)
• they were significantly better than their predecessors
• initially, they fit the needs of their creators
• they became the model to use, the latest craze, the offcial religion, the mainstream, displacing the previous models
• over time the number of corner case where the models broke increased to the point where they were unusable
• yet, the evangelists of the existing model fought hard to preserve them and to prove that suggested alternatives were pure lunacy (which, to be honest, 99% of them were)

My First Agile Project Part 13: Reflecting on The Decline of Agile

November 24, 2008 by mattgrommes

Picture courtesy of J.H.C. on flickr

Recently James Shore wrote an article called The Decline and Fall of Agile where he talked about how Agile, and Scrum in particular, is failing many companies. The main reason I started writing this series of articles on our team's experiences was to help myself examine why we'd had such a hard time with Scrum in various ways. In this part of My First Agile Project I'm going to go through Mr. Shore's article and compare it to our experiences.

In the article, Mr. Shore focuses mostly on the engineering aspects of Scrum, or lack thereof. In our experience, Scrum's lack of proscriptive engineering processes is hardly the biggest problem. It could be that we haven't had enough time to run into the walls of difficult-to-manage code that he's seen but thanks to some of the other problems we've had with shifting requirements and the like, we've all revisited chunks of our code during the project and we aren't slowing down because of it. Read on for more on Mr. Shore's essay and how I see it through the lens of our project. It may be that Agile is declining, but if so it isn't for the reasons he's seen.

The rise and flourishing of Agile

November 22, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Picture courtesy of tommoka@Flickr

The article discusses the qualitative change in the way people apply Agile methods nowadays comparing to the past. Earlier people were asking coaches for learning Agile from scratch, were taking the complete XP or real Scrum package and were happy. Nowadays they install the basics of Scrum themselves usually taking into use just backlogs and stories, fail to get on the engineering practices, shared workspaces and the all important Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, struggle and, well, sometimes blame Agile for their pain. So is such contemporary Agile bad?