Scott Ambler talking in Cape Town. For free! One of the Agile thought leaders, now working at IBM Rational. Also a notorious Scrum maligner. I had to go. If only to be equipped to do damage control. So I pitched up with as open a mind as any Scrum Coach and Trainer could…

After coffee and muffins, nearly 200 people filled the small Sports Science auditorium. Scott gave a discursive and entertaining three-hour talk that spanned a number of threads. His blunt style evoked laughter as the audience identified with many of his observations. Here are some of the things I heard him say – I think.

Myths and Facts

• Software development is an art rather than science with people rather than technology at its core.
• IT organisations all over the world are messed up in more-or-less the same ways; all making the same mistakes, due to all basing their way of working on the same set of false premises.
• They discover a problem, put a band-aid over it, discover another problem, fit another band aid and so on. Nothing actually gets fixed.
• Traditional project management is based on lying, and stakeholders know this.
• Earned value management is another lie – there is no value until the software is delivered. It is just not the right metric.
• The US has a $600 billion data quality problem. And it’s not getting smaller.
• We (IT) are not professionals – we don’t get respect from anybody.
• Most organisations choose to fail – it’s more comfortable to fail in familiar ways than to succeed in unfamiliar ways.
• Project retrospectives don’t work – the lessons ‘learned’ are not put into practice, because the project has ended and there is no longer motivation to do so.
• Doing things against natural human behaviour will always fail.
• Every hand-off is a risk and a point at which defects are introduced.
• Media richness theory tells us that the best way to communicate is face-to-face and the worst is via written documents.
• Change management is a euphemism for change prevention and is unethical.
• Logged defects older than a year are waste and should be deleted.
• The most valuable artefact to Agile developers is working software; the least valuable is Gantt charts.
• There is no statistical difference between the success of projects in organisations who implement the CMMI and those who don’t, whether Agile or not. There is a significant difference in success between Agile and not.
• Collocated Agile teams report a 79% project success rate compared with 73% who are “near located” and only 55% who are “far located” (requires air travel).
• Collocation results in increased job satisfaction.
• Near location often needs only a “decorating decision” to save 6% and payback is achieved in one week!
• Regarding distributed teams: (1) don’t; (2) observe Conway’s Law – distribute in relation to your architecture; and (3) use appropriate tools and techniques.
• Most distributed development is based on a lack of trust.
• Beware of off-shoring: if you’re failing now to manage your own people locally, there is no chance you will succeed in managing people off-shore.
• Fire the evil bastards who hang art on the wall in your IT department! Fill all walls with white boards or whote board wallpaper.
• A repeatable process in software development is nonsense. In every instance there will be changes for scaling, distribution, domain, people, …
• The bureaucrats are out of control…and so are the HR people!
• You can change your organisation [fix it] or you can change your organisation [move to another]!
• Lean (“optimise the whole”) helps explain why Agile works
• Two-thirds of software features built are rarely or never used (Standish report) – so don’t build them! The product backlog addresses the risk of building the wrong things.
• Business wants estimates in order to manage financial risk. Agile makes this unnecessary – we only have to fund one iteration (at a time).
• The iron triangle – one of scope, schedule and cost has to be variable; if you fix all three vertices, quality becomes the undesired variable.
• Traditional development is gambling! We need to remind management that they got burned in the past and there is (now) a better way.
• Fixed price work is unethical. As wannabe professionals we need to stand up to the bureaucratic treadmill.
• Every developer should attend a two-day “introduction to usability” course. And an “introduction to security” course.
• There are simple ways to refactor databases – to learn how, buy Scott’s book!

Call to Action

Scott made a clear call to action amongst IT and business managers in organisations:

1. Start experimenting with Agile. This is the easiest decision in decades for management to make! There is a very big upside with very little downside.
2. Train your people.
3. Get some help (coaching).

Despite his sniping at Scrum, I was pleasantly surprised at the sense he made. And I hope local organisations heed his call – my phone should ring off the hook on Monday…

I’ve been updating myself on the activites in the Prince2 camp to update this project management framework. One thing that stuck is the lamentations about the large number of PINO projects. PINO is an acronym (actually an initialism) for Prince In Name Only. In the Scrum world this has commonly been called ScrumButt, drawn from “we’re doing Scrum, but…” as well as the frequent desire to kick such teams in the butt!

Martin Fowler, one of Agile Manifesto signatories has blogged recently on “flaccid Scrum” (http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html). FWIW, I agree with him.

We must constantly remind ourselves (and those whom we seek to influence) that:

• Scrum is silent on which “software engineering” practices to use, but not on their use.
• We must continuously assess our way of working against the Agile principles.
• Undone work (aka technical debt) will continue to cripple delivery of value as long as we continue allow it to accumulate.
• Scrum is just a tool to expose deficiencies and dysfunction in the team and the organisation – the problems remain ours to tackle and solve.

So while we continue to battle our demons, how about honestly calling some Scrum implementations SINO (Scrum In Name Only)?

At the Scrum Gathering in Orlando last week Pete Behrens facilitated an Open Space session on “Metrics and Myths”. We considered four categories of measurements: productivity, quality, predictability and value. In each we each contributed measurements that are either “metrics” or “myths”. We stuck them up on a wall as you can see in the photos. In this first post I’m simply showing the pictures I took of the session. In subsequent posts, I aim to construct some reasoned arguments for a few Agile metrics Mike and I consider valuable to any organisation transitioning to Scrum.

Metrics & Myths

Right now I’m sitting at the back of the class while my good friend André is conducting an introduction workshop on ITSM (IT Service Management) using the ITIL framework at a major retailer.

He tells a story to illustrate the difference between incident management and problem management. The latter requires a root cause analysis. The aha! moment for me is when he says that root cause analysis is the start of a CM (Change Management) process.

I realise that Scrum is an ongoing change management process. In every daily Scrum meeting, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective the team (and stakeholders) inspect their work and their process and make adaptations to improve.

Scrum rules!

I was fortunate to attend the Scrum gathering last week. It was held at the impressive Gaylord Palms resort in Kissimmee, Orlando. I arrived early and spent Sunday visiting Disney’s nearby Epcot theme park.

Space Shuttle Discovery launch 2009.03.15 19:45

Planet Earth at Epcot

Our evening cocktail party, hosted by the PMI, was interrupted to observe the launch of the space shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Centre, some 50 km East of Orlando. Just before the 7:43 pm launch time we gathered on an East-facing balcony to watch. This was to be the last night-time launch of the shuttle as we know it. We weren’t disappointed.

Being Agile includes working at a sustainable pace. That means we have time for important things outside of work. Like our family, our health, our faith and our planet Earth.

I invite you to invest an hour together with a billion more people in our planet Earth. Sign up at:

http://www.earthhour.org.za/?refer=16c79cd9c309f09dda3606abfaedcff

We’re pleased to announce our first public CSM courses in South Africa for 2009. First a course in Jozi (26-27 February) followed by one in Cape Town (3-4 March). This is your opportunity to pump up your Scrum skills!

Early-birds who register and pay by 16 February will pay only R8 900 (including VAT) – a saving of R2 000.

You’ll find course details here. You can book online here.

Ball Points game at CITI

Sounds a bit like S*x and the City, but no!

I was invited by Martin Wright of Cape Venture Partners to talk to members of the CITI My Mentor programme about Scrum. As we frequently experience, most of these IT entreprenuers knew nothing about Scrum…other than the game of rugby kind. After a short intro we ran Boris Gloger’s Ball Points game to illustrate the value of empirical over defined process models.

The key learnings were (and this is always the case):

• Wow, we really improved the process a lot over the 5 iterations by applying our learning!
• Our estimates were quite close to actuals from the 3rd sprint on.

It’s always exciting to see the cogs click as people – in this case entrepreneurs – start to visualise the potential for applying Scrum principles in their businesses.

Now they need to decide whether to do something about it or just go about business as usual.

Boris Gloger has just spent another week with me doing Scrum Training in Midrand, Gauteng and in Cape Town. For the first time in South Africa we ran Product Owner training as a follow-on to the CSM class. This was well-received with 22 people receiving both CSM and CSPO certificates.

Overall in 2008 we have run 9 classes together in South Africa and Brazil with 177 participants including 132 CSM’s and 22 CSPO’s. 2009 looks to be a busy year too.