Lean and Green: Lean and Scrum - Chicken and the Egg

For some reason I can't explain, metaphor's abound with respect to farm animals and agile (Pigs and Chickens for instance). So I figure I'll pile on a bit here!

I've seen, read, and listened to several agile and lean experts discuss how lean and agile are related. The discussion is a bit frivolous in my opinion, but after hearing it enough times, I wanted to set the record straight on Scrum.

We built Scrum for one reason. We wanted a process that reflected how software actually got built rather than one that tried to control how people should think and structure code. While at Easel Corporation, as the software development manager for the first ever Scrum (Ken Schwaeber hadn't yet started the CSM marketing machine, so there was no such thing as a "Scrum Master"), I had to figure out how to manage my team in an environment where most of the requirements weren't well understood, and those that we did understand seemed to change as quickly as they could be committed to paper(?). And I had to figure out how to describe what we were doing to my management team (Jeff Sutherland, John Dove, and others).

I sat in my cube working tirelessly to maintain my Gantt charts. I'd meet with my team members and review our requirements and designs. I'd try and extrapolate tasks for the team. I'd roll-up estimates and make predictions. I'd then sit back and look at what I'd created and think it was total bullshit (another gratuitous farm reference). There had to be a better way. This is where Scrum came from. We abandoned traditional planning and developed the notion of the "backlog". We also re-used the notion of incremental development from Sprial and RAD/JAD and introduced Sprints. We found the Backlog and Sprint to be very effective tools in planning and managing work i our volatile environment.

We felt like we were on to something here.

After some research, Jeff Sutherland found some similar models for how work was defined and managed that aligned with what we were doing. This was documented in a 1996 Harvard Business Review paper by Takeuchi and Nonaka.

Meanwhile back at the ranch... (yep, back to the farm) Kent Beck et al were busy refining XP. In the early days there was no communication between the Easel team and Kent's team. So I can't personally speak to the degree to which XP was influenced by lean. But I can inequivocally say that the primary innovations introduced by Scrum were done so independently of what we know of today as "Lean".

Are there common practices across Lean and Scrum. Yes, of course there are. Is this a coincidence? Not really. As with XP, some of the basic concepts that Scrum introduced are about how we can more efficiently deliver value on software projects to our customers. So does it really matter which is the chicken and which is the egg?

Comments

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I completely agree, who cares about which ones was first? I just find it interesting to see the comparisons. This must mean that the core ideas are valid and bring us closer to even better ways of delivering products in the future.

Posted by: Nick Oostvogels | October 27, 2009 at 05:39 AM

"working tirelessly to maintain my Gantt charts" - that's exactly what I did for some time, too. It sucked big time. Luckily I came across "Agile Software Development. Principles, Patterns, and Practices" by Uncle Bob and got started with migrating our processes to agile. For me, too, especially a backlog and sprints where one of the first things we introduced. It was so great to dump that useless Gantt charts!

Posted by: Matthias Marschall | October 30, 2009 at 09:02 AM

Hi,

Great posting and adding to the "history" of the analogies or metaphors (smile). Over three years ago, I wondered why nobody really grabbed on to the idea of the chickens and pigs via some type of cartoons. So (I can't draw) I connected with an artist and over the years (and ongoing) we have come up with about 100 different cartoons about working with Scrum, XP, and other agile techniques using them as a central character. They are creative commons, so please feel free (as many have over the years) to use the illustrations for non-commercial purposes.

Thank you!

- mike vizdos

Posted by: Mike Vizdos | November 01, 2009 at 10:52 AM