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.

stabilisers
bulldozer

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?

Published by Matt

I write software, and love learning how to do it even better.

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