That has got to be one of the least flattering stills (of the woman) I’ve ever seen.
Thanks to the vast weath of knowledge offered by Boing Boing Store at incredible discount pricing, soon I shall be so educated that the sheer mass of my upgraded intellect will colapse into a black hole of knowledge so dense it will start to suck knowledge straight out of internet start ups, libraries, the internet and right out of people’s brains! Mwuhahaha!
I’d make fun of this one, but it’s already mocking itself better than I could.
I am just delighted that I have lived long enough to see a future where “Agile/Scrum Certification Training” is a thing.
I think Agile Scrum is also a new Harry Potter character…or maybe a woman in a James Bond novel…
I need to reread The Rhesus Chart. I feel certain the answers lie somewhere in there
Contrary to popular belief, the best project managers aren’t just the people who “get things done.”
That’s a popular belief?
Anybody familiar with the game of Rugby will know that a scrum is something in which large, sweaty men keep pushing in opposite directions until a small ball falls out. It is more or less the opposite of agile, but it does describe a lot of management meetings rather well.
I know 1 weird trick that can save you 100% on Agile/Scrum Certification Training.
run as fast as you can? (I dodged the offer very agile. does this count? am I qualified?)
close enough 
While I actually do like scrum development much more than waterfall, I recall pointing out the origin of many of the terms used in the method when we were discussing it in a software engineering class a few semesters back. I mean really, we were a room full of computer geeks discussing things in sports terms. Where did we go wrong?
(Actually I do know a few athletic CS majors, including a few that are pretty fit, but most of us did see a lot of humor in the situation.)
Until I retired I worked for a software company that made (makes?) a product which has to work in a rapidly changing environment. Waterfall would never have worked. My problem was that the top management didn’t really understand the software development cycle and nor did some of the customers. They had trouble understanding that introducing new kit into their environment often required additional code due to a lack of standards for compliance. So some customers complained about too frequent updates and being asked to run diagnostics.
Top management therefore brought in an experienced guy in his early 60s to fix the problems. His solution? Demote the person who was responsible for the network part of the codebase, where the problems lay, and bring in a PhD from a military systems company - where waterfall rules. Nine months later as customer problems persisted, he introduced a design freeze and I decided to take early retirement.
So yes, I prefer the approach implied by scrum methods, I just object to the quasi-religion and the pseudo-Zen buzzwords. My feeling is that at the end of the day what is needed is for managements to take time to understand what their companies actually do, and work with the engineers on how best to facilitate it. No special sauce is needed.
I had encountered the ideas behind scrum before the class*, although that was the first time I had really gotten to work with it. Glad to say that although the professor loves scrum methods and certainly expected the students to learn the terms, he wasn’t a glassy-eyed zealot about it when it came down to implementation time. I was able to look back on client projects and some development work I’d done with other teams and saw places where the ideas would have been very useful, but yeah, not being a fundie about it seems the best course of action! (It can actually be good to be an “older” student sometimes - I can actually see how much of this stuff can actually be applied.)
(* It was a second level SE class wherein the entire class worked on a project for a real world employee. I was part of the team that continued the work over the Summer and it was picked up by the next two classes to continue development. I’m really happy to say that it’s now being used by the emergency management office in SE Wisconsin, with plans to see if it can be used in the rest of the state. This is one of those projects where I’m glad to point to it and say “I helped make that!”)
The rugby version involves getting head-down and having a shoving match with the other side, sometimes involving ear-chewing, scrotum-grabbing, and neck-breaking (although the latter is frowned upon); the software variant is not dissimilar. It has its origins in Agile methodology, although it’s Agile hopped up on crystal meth and spoiling for a fight: exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a bunch of city high-flyers to find appealing (at least in principle, and as long as it didn’t look likely to detonate a large landmine under their bonuses).
Stross, Charles (2014-07-01). The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files Book 5) (p. 32). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Welcome to the latest fad-of-the year. Unsurprisingly, it will be useful for some companies, a hindrance in others. Why does every new idea get hauled around like Cinderella’s slipper where everybody tries it out without considering whether or not it fits?
For instance, how would this work in a customer service type situation where the demands of clients are not consistent and can’t be predicted–how do you set daily goals for that? And sprints sound like artificial deadlines to increase productivity by increasing stress. Many people do produce more under pressure, but they break faster too.
I worked on a research paper that found that teams that use some development can be more productive, it has to be within an organization that wholly supports it, and it has to make sense for the project. In other words, it’s a great framework but it’s not magic.
Well, it’s a belief.
