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November 14, 2005
Microsoft, Scrum and Slashdot
'm sure, by now, everyone's read eWeek.com's article about Microsoft's growing adoption of Scrum.
But what I found interesting was the followup by Slashdot.
Slashdot is, of course, a notorious Microsoft hating community.
It is also a community that holds a love/hate relationship with "traditional" software development -
bemoaning long hours, poorly understood requirements, poor quality releases.
So it was fascinating to see the interchange between the two subjects - Agile Development and Microsoft.
Here's what I noticed:
- Many commentors subscribe to the 'If Microsoft likes it, it must be bad' school of thought. I've seen this before - any technology that Microsoft adopts, they hate. Any standard, any practice, any concept developed by or supported by Microsoft is instantly considered 'untouchable'. Microsoft could probably remove a significant portion of its critical community by announcing that they believe that people should drink fluids.
- Many commentors subscribe to the 'Agile is the buzzword-laden pathetic lame-ass flavor of the month' in software development, and therefore it is no surprise that Microsoft, a pathetic lame-ass company would adopt it.
- Many commentors noted with great mirth that since Microsoft used Scrum on project X, and project X was late and missing promised features, that indicated that Scrum was not an acceptable software methodology.
- Some noted that the lack of a significant volume of project success with agile methodologies made the concepts too immature to take at face value. The agilists' claim that 'there hasn't been enough time to build up the necessary volume' is considered a cop-out.
- There were a number of people who believe that Agile == low quality - from their perspective, the use of iterations as a 'time limit' ensures that bugs will not be fixed and QA will not have enough time to properly test.
- At least one person dismissed Scrum as 'not truly new', which implies that it is therefore not interesting
- Some believe that Scrum is just another way to pressure developers to work long hours over a short period of time.
These are important observations, for many reasons, probably the most critical of which is that Slashdot is generally considered the one of the thought-leading technology/software development communities.
And to be frank, Scrum's complete flexibility about the internals of the process (the candy bar for which Scrum is the wrapper)
makes it very susceptible to claims of:
- it's just the flavor of the month buzzword bs
- managers will use this to force people to work huge hours
and
- the team will sacrifice quality to make the date.
(The anti-Microsoft venom is best ignored)
I don't necessarily have a good answer for those objections. If I were in charge of the
Scrum website, I'd consider the following:
- Emphasize it's use on real-world projects
- Emphasize 'good practices' as part of the success - such as 40 hour work-weeks
Quality
The quality issue is vexing, because very few people (myself included) believe that one can successfully ensure that every iteration comes in on time, because of late-found, difficult to reproduce/repair bugs that derail the iteration. Personally, on a 6 month project, I always assume the last Sprint will be purely bug fixing, no new functionality. This is probably the area in most need of ideas/research/solutions in the entire agile hierarchy, and one that is explored regularly by Brian Marick and many others.Posted by jb at November 14, 2005 04:10 PM
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