Poppendieck at CAMUG
Mary Poppendieck once again gave a presentation at CAMUG last week in Calgary. I didn’t really learn anything new. It all sounded like sound advice.
Two interesting parts:
1) Mary said something along the lines of development groups need standards and standards are there to be challenged. They are there to be used as a baseline against which we can measure improvements in the standard. Now technically she was talking about architecture, tool and code standards, but I wondered about higher level standards like lean development. I managed to restrain myself from asking if lean development standards could be challenged.
2) Towards the end of the presentation, someone asked about Scrum and in particular about the backlog. Mary replied with something along the lines of that the backlog is just a way to put off people’s requests and is really only useful in a disfunctional organization. Basicly, if you are a good organization, you shouldn’t have a backlog. Now, I could care less about the Scrum backlog specifically and whether it is good or not, but I was pretty jazzed to hear the descent from Mary. What? Sometimes Scrum doesn’t work? I’m shocked. (Ed. That last part was sarcasm). It was also pretty funny as the palpable rumble of amazement/disagreement wafted through the crowd.
on October 23rd, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Why did you not ask Mary about lean development standards? It sounds like it was an ideal opportunity to raise the question with one of the thought-leaders in the field. And it sounds like a very relevant and useful question.
on October 23rd, 2006 at 5:46 pm
Yeah, I suppose in retrospect I should have asked the question, but its importance maybe didn’t strike me enough and in time to prompt me to speak up. Live and learn…
on October 24th, 2006 at 6:51 am
I asked Mary what she actually said, since the statement as reported doesn’t quite make sense. Unfortunately, she didn’t remember what she said. Oh, well.
on October 24th, 2006 at 7:18 am
I don’t know what you mean by the statement as reported doesn’t quite make sense. It makes sense to me.
on October 25th, 2006 at 8:35 am
I’m sorry, I didn’t provide any context for that comment. I meant the statement about the scrum backlog. In plain English, the word “backlog” suggests a list of unfinished work that’s been shunted off somewhere to be (probably) forgotten. But in scrum terminology, the backlog is just the (poorly chosen?) name of the list of planned work on a project. Other processes have some kind of list of planned work, too, whether it’s called a “story list” or a “work breakdown structure” or whatever. So in effect the statement is that any organization that has any work in plan at all is dysfunctional. That’s the bit that doesn’t make sense to me.
Mary didn’t recall the statement in question, but she did send me an email thread in which people were talking about a “backlog” of tasks that nobody ever gets around to working on. They weren’t talking about scrum, but about organizations that allow an unmanaged queue of work to pile up, so that nobody ever gets around to addressing the items on the queue. In context, this seems like general English usage of the word “backlog”.
on October 25th, 2006 at 8:48 am
I can see your point, but it is probably my poor writing that confuses things. In any case, my understanding of her point was not that all plans (call it a backlog or not) are bad, but that using a backlog or list of work to ignore people’s request (either on purpose or because you don’t have time) is disfunctional.
This also gets into a debate about what the Scrum backlog is really supposed to be, which is a debate I don’t really want to get into here. Suffice to say, there have been cases (personally experienced and heard from others) where (rightly or wrongly) the backlog in a Scrum project was used as a dumping ground for every idea ever conceived of on the project, which obviously led to issues/requests being ignored for a long time and often never being addressed at all.
on October 25th, 2006 at 9:13 am
“…not that all plans (call it a backlog or not) are bad, but that using a backlog or list of work to ignore people’s request (either on purpose or because you don’t have time) is disfunctional.”
Definitely true.
“This also gets into a debate about what the Scrum backlog is really supposed to be…”
No, it doesn’t. The definition is unambiguous. Scrum is really very simple to describe.
You say you’ve seen the Scrum backlog used as a dumping ground…that’s no different from the more general case. All kinds of task lists have been so abused. You just like to single out Scrum because it’s often used on agile development projects, and you’ve got some kind of object stuck in an uncomfortable place when it comes to agile development.
on October 25th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Ummm…no I single out Scrum because people claim it (and Agile in general) to be a silver bullet. As you yourself said, it is no different from the general case and so therefore all these zealots need to be called out.
And it doesn’t matter what the textbook definition is. It matters how people are using it and pushing it and abusing it.
on October 25th, 2006 at 9:47 am
“I single out Scrum because people claim it (and Agile in general) to be a silver bullet.”
I don’t know anyone who claims that, although it’s easy to find arguments against them, just in case they should materialize someday.
“And it doesn’t matter what the textbook definition is.”
Right. But your comment was that you didn’t want to debate what the backlog was “supposed to be.” Supposed to be = definition.
on October 25th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Again, we apparently run in two different circles of truth. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.