RallyDev.com
Fri 24 Jul 2009
Implementing Scrum? – Avoid Cargo Cult Scrum
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Daniel J. Boorstin
Here’s something your team should look to avoid – Cargo Cult Scrum.
Members of the John Frum cargo cult
Cargo Cult Scrum is what happens when you adopt the practices, vocabulary, and artifacts of scrum but you don’t understand why or how they work. Cargo Cult scrum is bad. It is accidental and is based on ignorance.
Here’s a tiny piece of what Wikipedia has to say about cargo cults:
“A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-native cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices…”
When we talk about cargo cult implementations of scrum we are talking about people who seize on the advanced ideas of scrum and expect magical, unexplainable benefit to come from them, not realizing that informed usage is required in the bargain.
Craig Larman and Bas Vodde talk briefly about Cargo Cult Scrum adoption in their excellent book “Scaling Lean & Agile Development” in a section titled Avoid…Fake ScrumMasters. Fake ScrumMasters are created by “…Changing the title of someone to ‘ScrumMaster’ while he acts like – and is encouraged by the organization to act like – a project manager.”
They go on to describe the ultimate cargo cult scrum implementation:
“We adopted Scrum. Our Sprint length is the length of our project. The Product Owner decides the items in the Sprint and the project manager acts as ScrumMaster. He makes the Sprint Backlog and assigns the tasks to people in the team.”
So what does Cargo Cult Scrum look like?
Here are some examples that I’ve seen in the field:
- I recently attended a meeting at a company that considers itself to be agile. It was a regular meeting that occurred every two weeks. It was not attended by a scrum team, but instead by a bunch of people from two different groups. The three questions were not used. The meeting was scheduled for, and took, 30 minutes. Yet the meeting was called a scrum. Other meetings at this company are called scrums, so much so that ’scrum’ has become a synonym for ‘meeting’. This is a cargo cult. The true meaning of ‘daily scrum’ has been lost, if it was ever apprehended in the first place.
- I’ve also seen organizations in which people call every item on the Product Backlog a User Story (which is not the same thing as every item on the Product Backlog actually being a user story).
- Another example is this actual [paraphrased] conversation I had with a potential customer:
Customer: Oh yes, we’ve been doing agile for a while.
Coach: That’s great! So you haven’t had any trouble getting the Product Owner to work closely with the team?
Customer: Well, we…uh…don’t really have a Product Owner.
Coach: Oh. Well, who keeps the Product Backlog in shape?
Customer: Well, we…uh…don’t really have a Product Backlog, per se.
Coach: Oh. So how do you plan your sprints?
Customer: Well, we really don’t do that in a very formal way. But we do meet every morning. That’s what it’s all about, right?
- And my all time favorite. I was once told by a manager of a supposedly Agile group: “We like things the way they are. We know it’s not perfect. We don’t want to change.” Yikes. So much for Continuous Improvement.
Though you shouldn’t do Cargo Cult Scrum for any reason, the reality is that any step down the road to scrum is usually better than whatever preceded it.
Don’t feel bad if your scrum implementation isn’t the same as what’s in the books. Feel bad if you are have stopped trying to make it better.
About the Author: Alan Atlas is a Musician, Certified Scrum Trainer, and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
Not doing cargo cult means to understand the causality of what is happening. This means there needs to be a science underneath things. What is the science underneath Scrum?
Alan,
Interesting point. I’m not sure I agree with your leap from the first sentence to the second, though. I agree that there must be a reason for the behavior, a method to the madness, as it were, in order for cargo cult to be possible. But I’m not sure that mere method or even causality requires or implies that science lies behind it, does it? Maybe I’m making too much of your use of the word ’science’.
For instance, I always spread a bunch of index cards across the table during sprint planning. I can tell you the correct (according to scrum) reason why I do it, and that shows that I am not doing cargo cult scrum and that there is a method or proper usage involved. If I can’t tell you why I spread the cards around and I do it in an inappropriate or ineffective way and don’t realize it, then I am doing cargo cult scrum. I’m just not sure there’s science behind it just because there’s a reason to do it.
Apart from all that, it’s the question you pose that’s the most fun. What is the science underneath scrum? I believe it’s Lean, which I’m willing to call an ‘empirical science’ without losing much sleep. I realize that not everybody would agree, but I find it helpful and relatively straightforward to understand scrum by application of Lean principles as I understand them to the tenets of scrum as I understand them.
Now, for extra credit, what would it mean if I explained scrum using cargo cult Lean?
alan
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Hey Alan,
I always enjoy encountering the scrum teams that have retrospected themselves out of retrospectives. “We’re so good, we can’t improve.” Often these groups are running scrumerfall, staggered iterations of dev and test, no continuous build. When challenged, the typical response is that scrum needs to be flexible for the team and that retrospectives actually disrupt the status quo.