October 23rd, 2008
Getting Trashed by the Lean Machine
I am in Buenos Aires for ten days, running CSM courses and Games Workshops at the Ágiles 2008 conference. It is an amazing experience, and a great honor to be here at the first Latin American Agile conference, and I’d love to wax lyrical about everything I feel being here, all the wonderful people I have met, and those I have renewed acquaintance with from previous visits. But that is not why I am writing this blog.
I am writing here to process an interaction which I found unsettling. There are a few guest speakers here from the USA including Mary Poppendieck and Micah Martin. It surprised and disappointed me that both Mary and Micah used the final panel discussion of the conference to publicly denounce Scrum as “insufficient for building software”, and deride the CSM certificate as being useless.
Micah bemoaned the fact that the last Agile conference (in Toronto) had been “taken over” by Scrum Masters, and made the comment that teams “did not need a Scrum Master to tell them what to do”. Luckily many attendees at this event were differently informed than Micah in their understanding of the role. I talked quietly off-panel with him afterwards to explain that 1) I agreed with him: teams do not need Scrum Masters to tell them what to do, and 2) that he had completely misrepresented the role. Micah was willing to listen and hear. In his other panel comments Micah said many memorable and insightful things about software craftsmanship that I happily agree with. In fact, I think that he and I are 90% aligned in our thinking.
More disturbing was Mary Poppendieck’s attitude towards Scrum. I would actually describe it as hostile, and when I tried to engage her in dialog about it later at the reception she (unlike Micah) seemed unwilling to listen but chose instead to talk at me. She claimed again that Scrum was insufficient, that it had the wrong roles, that it targeted dysfunctional companies (well, yes!), and that she disliked it because she spent 90% of her time cleaning up after bad Scrum implementations (she then went on to say she never worked in dysfunctional companies, which seems somewhat inconsistent with the earlier clean-up statement).
Then Mary singled out Jeff Sutherland as an exception, claiming he doesn’t do Scrum the way everyone else does, as he enforces all necessary software development practices, has a lead engineer in the team, does architecture up front, and has a Scrum Master who codes 90% of the time. In essence he runs “the Toyota process”. I am not stating facts here, just repeating the gist of the conversation. I concluded that in Mary’s opinion only Jeff Sutherland (and those trainers who work directly “for” him) understand what Scrum is, or ought to be: i.e. Sutherland-Scrum rather than Schwaber-Scrum. The rest of us are charlatans.
It was a very uncomfortable, and one-sided conversation, and a little surreal given the joy and openness of the conference up to that moment; it seemed that every question or comment I offered was taken as an attack. I was seeking a crack in the wall of resistance to initiate a dialog with Mary, but I did not find one. Dave Nicolette, also present at the table had more luck, perhaps because he is not a Scrum Trainer. Dave actually did a skillful and patient job of attempting to offer some balance to the conversation.
Disparaging and mocking comments about Scrum and CSM certification were also made during and following the Agile2008 conference in Toronto by some of the key speakers. There appears to be a trend here, one which I find ugly and sad. It is no surprise when people new to Scrum misunderstand it — it is difficult to fully grasp its full implication, but it is very surprising and disturbing that people deeply involved in the Agile movement show such a lack of understanding of the true nature of Scrum, to the point where they feel the need to publicly denounce it.
As I thought about all of this later in the evening, I recalled a comment Mary made during the panel today, immediately following my suggestion that reflection was essential and teams need to run regular retrospectives if they are to improve. Mary enthusiastically retreived the microphone from me and said something like “as the voice of opposition here I have to say that I don’t agree with Scrum retrospectives. I have my teams meet for a couple of hours every week to focus on process improvement, using ‘plan-do-check-act’ and other scientifically proven process improvement formulas” (I am paraphrasing).
It occurred to me that maybe Mary was a process-focused person, and was not considering, or particularly interested in human factors. Retrospectives in Scrum (for me, and many I know) begin with individual improvement, personal development if you like. Good process follows. Perhaps this is a key difference between Lean and Scrum: Lean is about efficient process; Scrum is about effective people.
I am sure the preceding statement will call forth loud objections, but I am grasping at straws here, trying to make sense of why someone as intelligent, experienced and well-respected as Mary Poppendeick would need to publicly disparage a beautifully elegant Agile framework proven to be so successful for so many organizations. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Why is Agile Software Development becoming a competition for some? Why must Scrum lose for Lean to win? This is not the presidential election. We are all seeking the same goals, and it is the diversity of thought, the rich, chaotic mix of ideas that will help us achieve those goals. There is no “one truth”.
I’d love to help get the focus away from competition and back onto collaboration. If you have any suggestions toward this end, please add your thoughts here.
N.B. this blog post naturally represents only my perspective. It is a gut response, wholly subjective, and therefore not “truth”. I’d be happy for anyone else present during the panel discussion or the following reception, especially those mentioned by name, to add their own perspective.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Hi, Tobias! I’m sorry you had such a negative experience, and I’m especially surprised it came from Mary, as I’ve always found her very pleasant in person. I’d encourage you to try again, as she is often very driven in conversations.
In the meantime, let me see if I can explain where she’s coming from.
Like her I have seen a lot of bad Scrum implementations, and I think the difference between the good and the bad ones depends mainly on who’s doing it. Although it’s been a while since I’ve read the Scrum literature, it was my definite impression that it was more about stopping the madness and limiting the scope of any given failure then about kicking ass and making great software. And I have certainly seen a number of teams get to a technically compliant Scrum implementation and stop.
I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing, as for a lot of companies, especially large companies, stopping the madness is a huge step forward. But people not realizing that they could do a whole lot more definitely bothers me. One of my biggest worries is that the Agile movement will end up with the same fate as object orientation. I’d say 80 or 90% of the developers writing in OO languages today aren’t writing what I’d call object-oriented code. If ten years from now everybody thinks they’re “doing agile” and all they’re doing is the very basic Scrum practices, I’ll be pretty disappointed, because I think there’s so much more that teams can do.
I think he concern about certification ties into that. Agile has had a huge uptake, and I keep running across people who are doing big agile adoptions driven mostly or entirely by people who have taken a few days of Scrum courses, with no other experience. But hey, they’re certified, so they charge on ahead.
Maybe the Scrum process will work out differently in the end, but in the software industry I’ve seen an awful lot of worthless certifications over the years. And I think they ended up worthless not because they were poorly done, but because a lot of the people who want to get certified just want to get their ticket punched. I knew a ton of people like that in college, who went and got degrees not because they cared about the subject, but because you had to have the degree to get some sort of flashy job. The incentives are pernicious, both for the students and for the certifying authority. I like that some of the Scrum certs are more than just tests, but I still worry that Scrum will fall to the same fate.
Does that help at all? I don’t think anybody is opposed to Scrum, really. I think it’s more that they’re worried that as we cross the chasm we’ll get watered down or corrupted. Scrum, as the most minimal and most broadly adopted of the Agile methods, will inevitably be the focus of a lot of those worries.
October 24th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Hi Tobias
I was not listen your conversation with Mary, but after that, while we are dining, we also talked about that.
To my understanding, Mary has a couple of concerns:
1- High Performance Team / Self-Directed Team / etc has a long history (at least longer than Scrum), with a pattern of failure: teams without (good*) leadership doesn’t last long.
2- Software IS NOT (or should not be) the goal of the team. The goal is to create wonderful products or services (end-to-end or concept to cash). So the focus of many Scrum implementation (the SM as a firewall to protect the SW dev team of a dysfunctional management/organization) is a good starting point, but you don’t want to stay in this situation for long. You (agile coach) want to bring down the (fire)walls as fast as you can, and integrate SW developers to cross-functional teams.
3- Is Scrum an (or a piece on an) evolution or a revolution? Revolutionaries tend to think that many things of the past MUST change. Evolution is step-by-step.
I think that Mary view is evolutionary, so why to reinvent so proven practices (as process improvement)?
In the pannel, you say that Scrum and Agile are Kuhnean paradigm change. But Einstein’s theory were Kuhnean, and included Newton’s one as especial cases. Is Scrum a especial case? I think that this is Mary point of view: Scrum is a temporary solution for a dysfunctional management/organization
4- She deeply dislike the PO role. Is not well defined, and it left the vision of the product in a limbo. Could anybody without a insightful grasp of the technology involved, has a vision of the product? could a great product emerge without a visionary (see point 1 on leadership)
(good*) leadership: she opt to trust on managers. why not? you have to respect people, you trust in your team, in your managers and in your client. If this is not the case, it is an impediment, solve it. Don’t work around it.
She is very assertive, no doubt about it. Is she the only one in our community? mmm
(I not talking about you!)
That’s is what I understand of the topic, I not sure what I think about it, but this is great! I have to think about it!
Thanks to come, and thanks for share your thoughts
October 24th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Tobias,
I think William Petri has made a point, in that Scrum is easy to attack because it is probably the most popular way of working in agile methodologies. And I’d like to add that this fact can make people a bit jealous, even though as you said, everybody is looking to make progress so it’s not a competition, it is something more collaborative (as agile is supposed to be!).
On the other hand, the certification craze also already mentioned definitely hurts Scrum. It’s not the process or the trainers fault, but the people that hires someone because of their certification without paying attention to everything else that is needed to have a good craftsman.
(And a bit of fault also lies in the people that let themselves be seen as saviors just because they took a two day course).
Anyway, it was a great conference and I think no one took Mary’s comments literally, at least that was the case with the people I spoke with.
All I can give you for reference about me is that I asked you a question in the closing panel, and also sat down with you to “stop the fighting” in the first day workshop.
Don’t worry, don’t take it personal, and above all, do not let it turn you down.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:48 am
I share the experience that it is hard to feel heard when Mary gets passionate about a topic. I try to remind myself that it’s probably just coming from different discussion-cultures. It’s still hard for me to not get frustrated when it happens (not only with Mary…), though.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Hi Tobias,
I feel I must leave a comment here, because I was sitting at the table next to Mary when the discussion went trough
First I’d like to thank you, for asking that question to Mary which initiated the whole discussion. I feel really lucky to be there at that moment and had the opportunity to listen all the opinions.
Secondly I don’t want to say much about Lean-vs-Scrum discussion (I’m a bit tired yet and I don’t think I can say much things valuable about it now). But I’d like to quote a british marxist historian (can’t remember his name) who once was asked, why left thinkers are always fighting against each other, while right wing people always agree. He replied something like “Because ideas are hard to make compatible, while money always goes in the same direction”
Of course that was in the marxist ideal world, and in our post-modern world money seems to be always in the middle, nevertheless yesterday I felt there are lots of ideas going around and much more new will come out from them.
Another philosopher I really like is Hegel, who gives a lot of importance to a moment in his dialects, he calls “negativity”. According to him, this moment occurs when two forces (or ideas or thinking systems) clash and is the most important moment, because it allows to something new to emerge. (this is my own simplification of Hegel, btw)
So I’m really, really glad all that discussion went through the panel and in the table, I’m very confident new ideas will come out in the future from all this.
And I’m also really happy that Agiles2008 wasn’t an exclusive “Lean conference” nor “Scrum conference”, instead a mixture of different ideas and people. I hope it will remain like this in future events.
Thanks again for coming to Argentina once more and support our small community as you being doing since a long time ago.
I hope we’ll see each other again in the short future!
Cheers,
Emilio
October 24th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
“[Scrum's] philosophical underpinnings focus on empowering the development team and satisfying customers. Its managerial culture is rooted in helping others achieve their goals. Its technical tools are focused on making fact-based decisions through a learning process. When all of these factors are in place, it’s hard for Scrum not to succeed.”
Extracted from “Why Scrum Works”, by Mary Poppendieck (foreword to Ken Schwaber’s book “Agile Project Management With Scrum”)
Does Lean work wonders when misinterpreted and applied only partially? Bridges, not walls.
Cheers Toby,
Alan
October 24th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I thought the veracity of the comments were a little above what was necessary, but though I too understand much of what Mary was saying, I also agree with most of your comments. To me, the “C” part of the CSM is not so much unnecessary as misrepresentable by those out of the know. I unfortunately see too many companies these days asking for candidates that have CSM, believing that they are like PMI certs. We must more ferverntly reiterate your post session comments about the “C” being a the start of the journey, not the end. Tom Poppendieck also made a good comment about how it was madness to believe that anyone coming out of Uni could be seen as a “master” of anything – similarly, no one coming out of a CSM should think they are a master either. Unfortunately, I think the Scrum Alliance pushes the certification for its goals and its goals are not necessarily the same as the software industry’s.
Never the less, I enjoyed sitting on the panel with you and participating in the conference with you as well. It was thrilling to see a nuevo community come to life with such an incredible explosion. We expected 200 and received 600 – all thirsty for knowledge!
m
ps – regardless of what mary says, in the deming cycle, the “check” phase IS a retrospective – even though it may be conducted slightly differently.
October 24th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Tobias,
It was a pleasure being on the panel with you. I’m sorry that you felt attacked, yet I must say your response was eloquent and agreeable.
My frustration is not specifically with Scrum but with the diminished focus on software in the Agile community. As Agile has grown it has become more of a project management topic rather than a software development topic. For good or bad, Scrum is the most prominent face of Agile project management and so it gets the blame.
I was among the first batch of Certified Scrum Masters taught by Ken. I understand what Scrum is supposed to be like. I’ve also been to many Scrum shops and have seen how Scrum often manifests. Too often I see Scrum Masters telling teams what to do. Whether or not this what Scrum Trainers teach, it is what Scrum has become.
Tobias, I think you have a clear vision and are fighting a noble battle. You said it best, and I paraphrase, “The goal of a Scrum Masters is to create a world where Scrum Masters are no longer needed.”
October 26th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Hi
I attended the conference. I’m taking my first steps in agile development and I got to say I understand both positions.
As a programmer, I’m with Micah because I prefer to do some TDD & refactoring instead of having a guy chasing me with some cards
But I understand that Scrum is a very organized way to work and I guess it’s useful (we still don’t use it in our company, because it’s a small one).
The position of Mary it’s kind of radical. Maybe it sounded aggresive, but that’s her personality.
Response: Lucus, I absolutely agree with you and Micah that developers need to take responsibility for their own work. I am going to repeat something from the original post: the Scrum Master should NOT tell the developers what to do. That is not his/her job. The Scrum Master’s job is to field the dysfunction exactly so the developers can focus on their craft.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
I agree with Tobias… agile is more about human collaboration than processes. Not that processes are unimportant, it’s just not as important as human interaction, it’s all on the Agile Manifesto people.
It should not ever be us vs them, it should be what can we uncover by developing software and helping others do it (again, the Manifesto).
To me this Lean vs Scrum thing Mary is talking about is as pointless as the now very old discussion of XP vs Scrum that happened some time ago in the groups. Today we see that very successful implementations of agile combine XP practices in a Scrum framework, hell, even Schwaber’s original book proposes the combination of two very successful frameworks.
Next thing we know we will start seeing Scrum vs Lean TV ads a la PC vs Mac, funny but pointless.
It should not even be Agile vs Waterfall, we should evolve towards just Software Development that proves successful, today we have proved that by doing Agile we can achieve that premise, who is to say that tomorrow we will be calling it something else, but in the end it’s still software development… our true passion.
I have a dream… my dream is that software development makes for a better world for humans to live in.
Why can’t we all just get along?
October 26th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
One additional thought,
There’s a very popular video on infoq (http://www.infoq.com/interviews/poppendieck-lean-2007) where Mary praises Scrum as very good framework…
“Scrum is a fine example of a Lean environment. Scrum is a set of practices; this is how you do things. Lean would be the principles behind those practices. Lean is the general principles that encourage you to use something like Scrum”.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Tobias, I just want to say that I am sorry she got through to you there at the end and maybe took out a bit of the joy we all shared at the conference. The hostility you perceived I cannot trace (some of the guys here might have got it right), but I think that’s how she is, and she got her sharp tongue under your armor.
Anyway, as Terry Pratchett says in Wings: “The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” and Mary seems just the kind.
One last thought on certifications, after the panel I talked to you about colored belts in martial arts and how they were designed for the occidental mind to help teach us oriental techniques by giving us a feeling of small intermediate accomplishment. I think the most remarkable analogy is that both martial arts and the CSM share the significance of the relation between master and student. I think the CSM course I took with Alan [Cyment] was astounding, and I know he learned from you. What you do is not like what everybody else does, so beyond all the little nuisances, beyond the fact that we are all loving software development, I am happy I got to learn from you guys.
Response: Thanks Diego. Mary didn’t really get under my skin, just a little itch
She said some valuable things, and perhaps on reflection a public forum was a fine place to say them. A little disturbance is sometimes necessary to keep us from complacency.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Even if I have just become a CSM, I have to agree about the importance of the certification itself; as our instructor Joseph Pelrine said, “I can only certificate that we breathed the same air for a couple of days”.
That said, Scrum is about addressing the chaos you tipically get in a complex and fast changing environment, not about developing software: I always use it with my wife whenever we have to “refactor” our garden (ok, that’s not too complex an environment, but I’m sure you get the point). If you’re looking for practices to improve the quality of software, you’re looking in the wrong place. One word of caution: Scrum really fosters software quality improvement, but it does not provoke it. People improve software quality.
Scrum is not bad because you see many bad Scrum implementations; I’m sure you can find bad implementations of almost everything (OO is not bad because many programmers disguise their procedural code – which is not bad per se, but the mix of the two is often weird). I want to stress that a SM does not tell the team what to do, as he is not the leader; he is a servant to the team (sort of an istance of the “sacrifice one person” strategy by Cockburn).
I also agree with the fact that a team needs a good leader (I know many will not agree with that). The only difference is that the leader should emerge naturally in the team, and should not be superimposed.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:47 am
[...] Posted by Micah Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:46:00 GMT Last week I attended Agiles2008 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was a fun, high energy conference. The highlight was a heated panel discussion at the closing of the conference. On the Panel was Matt Gelbwaks, myself, Tom and Marry Poppdieck, Dave Nicolette, and Tobias Mayer. Tobias has already posted a blog about the event. So that my opinion is not misconstrued, I’ll share it with you here. The future of Agile is Software Craftsmanship. Software is a young industry and we’re still discovering more about it every day. Yet, it has it’s origins in electrical engineering. So it’s seems that, at it’s inception, people assumed software was a form of engineering. And to build software systems should be no different from engineering any other creation. Take a bridge for example. Before building a bridge, you have to analyze the bridge requirements. How long will it be? How much weight must it hold? etc… Once the requirements are understood, you design a solution. Build to-scale models that you can push and stress to make sure the design hold up. Then, once you have a solid design, can you begin construction of the bridge. It’s waterfall. Waterfall worked for engineering so waterfall was applied to software. We know now that waterfall doesn’t work. Agile, is a realization that software is not a form of engineering. Agile is a realization that software is a craft. I have been to every North American Agile conference since the very first, and I have noticed a trend. In the first conference in Charlotte NC, laptops were open on every table, around every corner, with someone or a pair of people writing code. In many of the sessions, people were writing code or talking about it. This is the conference where people were bragging about their Ward number and desperately trying to improve it. It was truly a conference about software. Over the years, less and less coding could be found at the conferences. This last year, at the conference in Toronto, it was abysmal. Although there was some good content, I felt like the conference had been taken over by Scrum Masters. It was no longer a conference about software development. It had become a conference about project management, people management, and Scrum. This makes me sad. In middle ages, if you were a lord and you wanted to build a cathedral, you found a master craftsman. The master craftsman recruited other craftsmen and together they constructed amazing buildings that still stand today. These craftsman were passionate about their work and cared about creating great buildings. That is what made it work. They didn’t have scrum masters telling them what to do or cheering them on. The great work they did is a tribute to their craftsmanship. The future of Agile is Software Craftsmanship. Developers out there need to realize that software is a craft. As such, developers should strive to become craftsmen; strive to learn more about software; strive to write better code; strive to build the best software possible. The software you get from a team of true craftsmen will be unrivaled. It is the goal and quality within that drives a team of craftsmen. They’ll find a way to overcome obstacles and adapt to changes… despite management. [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 11:30 am
It is clear the name Certified Scrum Master on its own is at the base of all these discussions. Would the course be this popular if the alliance had called it Scrum Foundation course without a ‘certification’ attached to it? I believe not. On the other hand, isn’t it great that the CSM course is so popular? It can be a start for a lot of people to get interested in the broader agile perspective. The danger of starting a project with an unexperienced scrum master can never be eliminated. That is were common sense should play a role. You could also start a complex software development project with a set of developers whose experience is limited to a 5 day introduction to C#. Baseline: the right people on the job.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Harmony is the solution. There is no technological solution to violence. We have seen on Tobias workshop games that if I have a knife, you will have a gun and then I will have a gun machine and you will have a cannon. After a while nobody remember what was the cause at the beginning that brought us to the escalating of violence. But we do know how this is going to end ‘destruction’.
Mary, herself, has talked about this in the same session. She said, the way to overcome tensions is in harmony. She talked about Yin and Yang. But after that she has contributed to escalating of violence.
Collaboration, self-organization, reflection, courage, trustfulness are very harmonious concepts of Scrum. I think build ‘working software’, or whatever we build, is our contribution to a harmonious world.
Thank you, Tobias, for the excellent course you gave us.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Tobias:
First I want to thnk you for your great workshop about Agile Games at Agiles2008. I really enjoyed it.
I’m an XP guy, since my approach to agile development started reading and applying “Extreme Programming Explained”. In my first years learning XP and teaching to my students my discoveries, the “scrum like” part of XP was the first that shows its value complemneted with Pair Programming, but when I went deep and finally got TDD and the other “hard XP” practices was when I realized the full potential of agility.
In my country (Chile) we are far from the CSM courses, and when I knew that a “Certified Scrum Master” certification took only two days… I was shocked. Now, that I knew several CSM guys, I don’t have any doubt about the honesty of their effot in implement agility, but the very name “Certified Scrum Master” is really misleading: in two days one can only acquire a very rough understanding of agility, and take years to be a good Agile Coach, and more years to be capable to guide others guys with years of experience as apprentices to be coaches themselves. I really hope that this issue will be resolved with the intention of strengthening the movement agile
In my 7 years working with XP, I’ve foudn that improving it with Scrum tools in the management area make my agile method only better, and lean has made it contributions too.
Goog job and good luck
November 29th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Tobias:
I won’t make an extensive reply because I’m not sure of the value of it. But let me say this, no one I know has been thrown off the Lean Development or Lean Agile Scrum user group for discussing variant views. Many people, including many who would be considered industry dignataries and myself (twice) for expressing views that Ken – the icon of Scrum – didn’t want to hear. Of course, he always has had a reason instead of just not wanting to listen. Maybe what goes around comes around.
Response: Alan, I can’t speak for Ken, but seeing as you brought this up I understood that you got kicked off the list (twice, implying you were invited back once) for using it as a tool to promote your training classes. Which seems reasonable, no?