Scrum Metaphors: Virus, Bulldozer, Stabilisers
Is scrum a virus? Jason Gorman and Brian Marrick have been pondering on whether that might be a good thing.
I have a couple of metaphors of my own for Scrum.
For Organisations: Scrum is a Bulldozer For an organisation with a reluctance or resistance to change, Scrum’s strict rules and clear identification of impediments provide the organisation with a mechanism to quickly see and remove obstacles that are wasting time and money, and sapping staff morale.
For Teams: Scrum is The Stabiliser Wheels on Your First Bike For a team that is new to agile development, or working within an organisation that has never tried it before, Scrum’s simple principles provide a framework within which a team can and will have to learn mature engineering practices like Test-Driven Development, Pair Programming, Refactoring which make iterative software development not just possible, but a real pleasure. From the outside, management should find the team’s straightforward, easy-to-grasp progress reporting safe enough to let the team self-organise and learn the confidence and empowerment that every great team needs to succeed.
What happens when you take the stabiliser wheels off? Maybe something like this?
Mike Vizdos
Said on
February 5th, 2008 at 1:52 pm quote
Hi,
Don’t know if you have seen my site — I put up a comic and blog entry about this topic last night. May want to check it out at: http://www.implementingscrum.com/blog/2008/02/04/scrum-controversy-caught-in-the-middle-like-a-virus-did-i-say-controversy/
Thank you!
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