Last week I attended a roundtable and presentation by Ken Schwaber, one of the two original Scrum process developers and signatory to the Agile Manifesto. He reminds me of Steve
Jobs – same black sweater with round neck, grey hair sprinkled here and there…
somehow this image adds to projected credibility and I wonder if Ken is aware
of this.
A few takeaways...
1) Scrum team is all about the team, not the individual. The
way Ken drove this point across brought smile to my face however - he essentially
appealed to the virtues of socialism, how irrespectively of the talent and
abilities everyone should be rewarded equally. So, everything I've heard in my
childhood was not that bad after all, just Agile way of doing things?! hehe… I
just can’t imagine this philosophy really taking roots in the American culture.
2) I found Ken’s way of talking to the audience about Product
Owners (POs) refreshing, particularly in the room filled mostly with developers.
For example, Ken points out how scrum teams he interviews often complain that
POs don’t write good enough user stories for them. Ken concedes that writing
user stories is not necessarily the biggest value POs bring to the table. He
states it’s the team who should write, or rewrite if necessary, the story, as
long as it still represents what PO believes is a market need. POs should
maintain focus on bringing the voice of the customer to the table. They define
release vision for the team and ensure backlog prioritization reflects it, often
making high impact tradeoffs based on the information available to them at the
time.
3) Finally, Ken is questioning the whole notion of scrum
team’s commitment to deliver a given number of user stories during sprint
planning sessions. He reasons that all too often people interpret this commitment as a guarantee to deliver…
irrespectively of quality, which takes us all the way back to the world of
waterfall planning. What Agile strives to ultimately achieve in software
development is to take out the false idea of being able to plan the unknown –
the time it takes to innovate. Ken suggests replacing the term “commitment”
with “forecasting”. Contrast: “Team Jedi commits to deliver user stories X and
Y” vs. “Team Jedi forecasts to be able to deliver user stories X and Y”. In my
experience I found teams, particularly recently formed with limited history of
working together, tend to err on the conservative side of committing to fewer
stories precisely because of the fear of not delivering on promise. The notion
of forecasting may help free us from that mental cushion we learned to use over
the years, to pad our effort stimates in traditional waterfall project
planning.
All in all, the presentation was educational and inspiring. Thank
you, Ken. It was great to hear your perspective on how Scrum is being
adopted by other teams, and see you striving to keep abreast of our changing
world and how people embrace the change. After all, as you suggest - Scrum is
really about understanding and managing the change!
P.S. I look forward to reading my signed copy of Ken’s
recently published “Software in 30 days” book.
