In my personal development preferences, I’ve been a keen proponent of XP (eXtreme Programming) for quite a few years, from when I first learnt about it, and started using it, in the early part of this decade. Since that time I’ve been generally, an Agilist, but I always tried to align my own programming with the practices of XP.
The past couple of years though I’ve been thinking about how Agile engages with the management culture of Australian firms. One thing I’ve been trying to grapple with is the perception of XP as a ‘developer culture’ – from outside it’s typically seen as geekdom infinity raised to the power of nerd, times pi + the square root of two. In other words, management really perceives the XP practices and disciplines as part and parcel of the software developer’s particularly obtuse culture. They don’t like it, they don’t understand it; therefore they fear it (typical of the conservative Australian corporate culture if you ask me). But what to do about it?
All this was brought to a head last night, when I attended the Brisbane Scrum user group meeting. I went to the first meeting (very well attended) and this was my first follow up meeting (Unfortunately I missed Dave Thomas of Bedarra Labs in the December meeting due to unavoidable circumstances). Last night was a presentation by Martin Kearns of Renewtech in Melbourne. He was presenting the results of the Australian Scrum Survey.
As discussion ensued regarding the state of Scrum versus the other agile methods. There is some fear and loathing amongst the developer community regarding Scrum. I believe this is due to a single factor. The Scrum Alliance is quite open about engaging with the PMI (Project Management Institute) and other “mainstream” project management organisations. Now developers, generally (and often rightfully) fear this type of “suit culture” – the suit-and-tie, project managed, management-reporting, Prince II, ISO9000, driven culture of the MBA. And Scrum is trying to talk to these people! Therefore, the Scrum Alliance is these people. Well such a misconception is ill-founded in my view. Philosophically, in my opinion such a view is akin to the “pure but powerless” view that people often take in relation to politics. In my experience, it is trivially easy to convince a developer of the benefits of agile methodologies. And even though agile is focused on delivering real business value to the customer, it’s much harder to break through organisational inertia to have agile methodologies accepted by the “business” – the customer – and practiced in a really healthy way.
The eXtreme Programming “brand” just doesn’t really help. Even my wife, when she saw the title of one of the Kent Beck books I had put into our new big bookshelf, made some joking comment about “to the eXXXXXttttrrrreeeeemmmmeee!“. You know, dude, four guys snowboarding off the top of a Nissan Xtrail down some gnarly 300 metre vertical drop with a can of Pepsi Max in one hand and the rock-and-roll “devil’s horn” sign on the other, all cranking to some totally bitchin’ death metal soundtrack, I mean, totally sick mate – or some parody of same off The Simpsons. And it’s also really not productive to have a thousand businesses describe themselves as “agile” or “lean” when what they really mean they’re under-resourced, focussed purely on flogging the team to meet spurious deadlines, committed to fixed-price-and-feature outcomes, and generally planning-light and completely quality-adverse. We need to lift our game so these cowboys are seen as such by the business community.
Scrum, in my view, has the best game plan of all the agile methods to break down this conservative reaction to agility and achieve some real results.
In short, then, I’m looking at spending my own money on a Certified Scrum Master course sometime over the next month in Brisbane and continuing my journey in Agile on the Good Ship Scrum.
10 Comments
Spot on. And its this the same issue with fear of SOA, and anything else perceived to be (as Lisa puts it so well) eXXXXXttttrrrreeeeemmmmeee. It has to be communicated to business and put in terms of value, risk, cost, and benefits.
nice post, and yes – that CSM course is highly recommended.
Most developers I know and who use Scrum, like it.
About adoption and certification I agree. I wrote:
“Certification (CSM) seems to be one of the main reasons for Scrum success in the enterprise. The certification makes Scrum compatible for managment.”
http://www.codemonkeyism.com/archives/2009/01/23/scrummaster-and-zenmaster-the-joke-of-certification/
Stephan
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Programming is hard – http://blog.codemonkeyism.com
http://twitter.com/codemonkeyism
Stephan, that’s very true about the certification. Despite my own personal dubious feelings about certification, it certainly is a type of ‘branding’ that enterprise management accepts. And we need to learn their language, operate in their world, in order to be successful in ours.
Scot, you’re right. I use the certification as a tool to enable a good spirit of software development with Scrum.
Learn their language.
Stephan
I’ve never worked anywhere that picked up Scrum, though we did incorporate aspects of Scrum at Suncorp, so I may just be speaking out of turn here, but…
To my mind, the biggest fear I have of an organisation using Scrum is that Scrum doesn’t have built-in engineering practices. And it shouldn’t – it’s a project management methodology. Organisations that adopt Scrum need to be aware of this, and also adopt appropriate engineering practices. XP works well to cover that gap, but so do other practices.
I could easily see an organisation “adopt Scrum” and say “that’s all we need to do, right?”
@Robert: “To my mind, the biggest fear I have of an organisation using Scrum is that Scrum doesn’t have built-in engineering practices”
As you’ve said that’s not the goal of Scrum, which is a management process not an engineering process. There are no engineering practices in Scrum. Which makes adoption much easier because engineer resist engineering practices in process.
The stand of Scrum is: The engineers are best suited to know what they need to do. That’s their engineering job.
If needed they should use TDD, DDD, UML, parts of RUP and whatever is needed from their engineering perspective.
Stephan
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Programming is hard – http://blog.codemonkeyism.com
http://twitter.com/codemonkeyism
Stephan just said what I hadn’t got around to say – the development practices should be left up to the developers in their particular situation or level of comfort.
I just want to address Robert’s comment regarding organisations that “adopt Scrum” and then say “that’s all we need to do, right?”. I think there’s already that problem with agile in general. I guess I could answer this question better once I did the CSM course, but I think a company that just thought ‘adopting Scrum’ was a once-off purchase, like buying new server, will ultimately fail at it. That would be the same for organisations that adopt XP – it has to be constantly improved and adapted to survive.
Yes it’s an ongoing problem. I mentioned companies that talk about their agility and in reality are stuck like glue to waterfall. Martin Kearns mentioned the problem of teams that say they do Scrum but aren’t really last night, and Ron Jefferies mentions it in this interview here – http://scrummaster.com.au/Article.mvc/Detail/48 (and yes it’s THAT Ron Jefferies and yes he’s become a CSM – as well as Alastair Cockburn (!) which I think is illustrative of the momentum that Scrum is gathering amongst agilists).
“[...] like buying new server, will ultimately fail at it.”
Scrum will either change the company completely or fail. Or not being Scrum.
I really like your blog,
your analogy of the subject is really well done. Thanks for sharing your thoughts so openly.
Regards,
Martin