Can you please activate your webcams?
Please choose a sticky note color to use for this meeting
Please take one of these smiley stickers and tell the others how you feel now
Can you please activate your webcams?
Please choose a sticky note color to use for this meeting
Please take one of these smiley stickers and tell the others how you feel now
I love scrum. It’s an interesting implementation of the theory behind agile development that has been extended to the point that it’s like watching a ritual.
Every company has its own interpretation of scrum and the rules and roles that come with it.
Once per day, everyone stands up and gathers with kindred spirits to hold the daily stand up. This is almost always done standing because the scriptures say so.
The product owner pretends to be as external as possible to provide the right perspective despite just being someone within the team, like one of those fancily dressed up people in the rituals surrounding the UK elections.
The scrum master is like the shaman for the scrum rituals, spending days on complicated processes that don’t seem to add anything. They’re not the project manager, so they can only guide the rituals and gatherings and not the major forces behind life/projects.
As with many religious experiences, reflection is a critical part, and several different types of reflections are held to give everyone a chance to bring their lessons learnt to the community. After solemn reflection, the shaman will guide everyone towards a plan of development for the coming time.
The community works together on a colorful artwork called the “scrum board” on which bright, colourful shapes are placed. Some of those shapes and colours have meaning, but that depends on one’s community and its interpretation of the scripture. This artwork is worshipped as the guiding star by the community, and tarnishing it is met with severe consequences.
There are, of course, different churches of scrum. Some swear by paper plan poker, others have switched to digital. The exact interpretation of the scrum poker scripture can differ from office to office, but everyone agrees on the intent. Some companies have replaced the scrum poker ritual with alternative rituals.
In the end, for many companies scrum ends up being waterfall development with rituals. It’s a bit like atheist catholics, who have stopped believing in god but still go to church for the rituals and the sense of community.
Scrum is not the only religion. There are many others, each with their own rituals, religious figures, myth, and scripture.
My intension was to make a harmless little fun about scrum masters who extensively use colors and communicate like they have a conversation with children. But holly F this escalated quickly and just sounds creepy. Like a cult where non-believers are considered evil or unholy. Do these people still live in a reality where they go to work to earn money in first line? Are they hostile to people thinking different? Sorry, but this really creeps me out.
It’s literally just describing scrum and agile processes as if they were reporting on a cult/religion and its rituals. The bit at the end about it still being waterfall development with rituals actually got me pretty good lol
Only through true faith in scrum shall our software be finished and our income be guaranteed! The holy signs, only visible to the scrum manager and his close disciples, hidden deep within the sacred burn-down chart shall predict the future! We must put our faith in them, for only they can tell us if our release schedule harvest will bring us the sweet nector of short testing phases, or the hardships of many bugfix releases.
Expelled shall be the unbelievers whose heretic notions of waterfall design taunt the mighty scrum shamans! Those who do not follow the ways of scrum and refuse to partake in expanding our blessed JIRA board will be of no use to us righteous developers!
Now chant with us, followers of our sacred ideology, for we must never forget our essential guiding principles!
Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release!
Any common behaviour of any group of people tends to sound like a cult if you look at it from a distance and sprinkle a bit of religious wording in between. It’s a fun creative writing exercise. If you leave out the cult angle, it can actually be a good philosophical mechanism to think about how peculiar our “normal” behaviour is. Every culture has their own little unspoken rituals, expectations, and assumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema is the high-effort take on this, documenting American life from the perspective of an outside explorer as if Americans are some kind of uncontacted tribe.
Scrum is one of those processes people have come up with for very good reasons to solve real problems, but have been ossified by documentation, books, and business processes, turning it into something that’s half “good business practices that solve our work flow in a meaningful way” and half “we do this because it’s part of the steps we’ve been taught in college/during my scrum certification and because it’s The Rules”.
Oh God, you’re good…
You’re right, many things are just done, because “we always did like this” or its simple the only thing learned about scrum but never reflected or compared with the actual reality.