Old habits die hard
I had the privilege of attending a “Certified ScrumMaster” course being taught by Ken Schwaber who is one of the co-founders of the Scrum process. I’ve been using the scrum process for a few years and felt fairly confident in my ability to “live” the principles of Scrum but all it took was one exercise to smack me back to reality.
Scrum is about providing transparency in the development process to all involved parties. What is emphasized is that you can’t really know how long it will take you to do something because the software development process is such that we can only provide best guesses. However, clients being clients, they want predictability. Unfortunately, we have given our clients the false expectation that we can provide predictability when we all know that there is no way we can. One can never know exactly what will take place in a project. Features, requirements, human issues, etc. are never 100% known so how can you say you can get this done by a specific date guaranteed unless you pad your date like crazy and even then there is no guarantee?
Therefore, the point of agile as a whole is to educate and inform all parties involved (especially the client) about this reality. We can reasonably say that it is feasible that we could complete the project by a given date but we can’t give a 100% guarantee and therefore, if the application is mission critical to be complete by that date that they the client should make contingency plans just in case we ca not make the given date.
Anyway, we went through an exercise that took place 1.5 days into the 2 day training course. We had gone over all the various concepts behind scrum, Ken had guided us through several exercises about the various concepts within scrum. So we began to do a mock project. We received our requirements, created highlevel stories, provided storypoints and person-day estimates for each of the stories and then proceeded to determine if we could get the work done by march 31st which was the hard deadline for the mock client.
In the end we were asked to present our estimates team by team to our mock client. This being a test, Ken started with the first team who put into practice what we had learned over the past 1.5 days.
Given what we know about the application and the requirements provided, we think we could possibly provide you with a complete solution for you by the march 31st deadline. We will need to hire a few more developers to ensure we meet the deadline but it seems possible.
Ken began to push them by asking questions and prodding us to commit to completeing by March 31st, 2009. Many resisted and other gave absolutely no resistance. However, in the end, the vast majority of the teams relented and committed to getting it done by the given date. At which point Ken took the shovel we used to dig our graves with and hit us over the head with it. Paraphrasing Kens words:
Even after one and a half days of learning and making fun of people that made stupid mistakes with just a little bit of pushing you all forgot everything! You went back to making promises that you know you can’t keep.
The room got scilent, others who stupidly choose to defend their actions were hit over the head again and again until they accepted their error. Ken himself admitted that even ave 16 years of using and teaching Scrum, he still falls back on these deeply ingrained bad habits and that it takes concious effort not to regress to old habits.
The course was the best course outside of university that I have ever taken. If you plan on doing a scrum master certification course, make sure you take it with him regardless of the cost/location. I learned an emmence amount from him and have found a larger passion on promoting the principles behind scrum to the people within our company and abbroad.
Tags: certification, ken schwaber, old habits, scrum
