Comments on: Implementing Scrum? – Avoid Cargo Cult Scrum

By: Free Science, no more cargo-cult « cistronic

Free Science, no more cargo-cult « cistronic — Fri, 20 May 2011 07:29:40 +0000

[...] not to mention organized religion, but you might be able to observe it also in programming and software engineering. Which leads to the conclusion that there is no real difference between many of the guys running [...]

By: Losing the Agile Plot | | Arrie van der Dussen |

Losing the Agile Plot | | Arrie van der Dussen | — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 10:28:51 +0000

[...] lot has been written on ‘Cargo-Cult Scrum’ (http://www.rallydev.com/agileblog/2009/07/implementing-scrum-avoid-cargo-cult-scrum/). I would [...]

By: Rich Feather

Rich Feather — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:16:10 +0000

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.

By: Scrum is just a tool! You choose when and how to use it. Don’t be a slave to it! « Knowing-Doing – Agile practices

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:04:44 +0000

[...] If there is no nurturing in the work practices in your particular environment then one only sees cargo cult behaviour when it comes to [...]

By: Losing the Agile plot… «

Losing the Agile plot… « — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:24:16 +0000

[...] lot has been written on ‘Cargo-Cult Scrum’, I would like to take it further and name it ‘Cargo-Cult Agile’. This is where organisations or [...]

By: Alan Atlas

Alan Atlas — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:38:35 +0000

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

By: Alan Shalloway

Alan Shalloway — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:40:16 +0000

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?