Re: The Essence of Agile and Scrum

On Friday, December 6, 2002, at 12:27:57 AM, Ken Schwaber wrote:

> I was at a BOF at SD East and Craig brought up that he thought that
> time-boxing, as in the Sprint, was the essence of agility. I demurred a
> reply at the time, but I've decided in retrospect that time-boxing is
> critical. However, the following aspects are equally critical, and all of
> them play with each other to create the beauty of agility:
> 1. That the work being done in the time-box is of the greatest urgency and
> importance to the user, the customer, otherwise why is the time-box
> relevant?
> 2. That the people in the time-box are able to be as creative as possible to
> reach the best solution they can come up with. That is, that the principles
> of self-organization and then emergence will be given full play within the
> time-box. If someone external is directing the team, then it's not agile.
> 3. That the team has good engineering practices so that what they create is
> the real thing, not just some pale shadow of the real thing ... such as a
> buggy, poorly designed set of functionality that really never has a chance
> of being "an increment of potentially shippable code."

Outstanding thoughts, Ken. Some of your best work.

On the same subject, time-boxing, I'm reminded of my funning way of
describing Alistair's Crystal Clear:

  Come together in peace, love, and understanding, ship software every
  month, and think about it.

Again, the timebox is critical. If I were to say why, in XP terms, I
would emphasize primarily the feedback value.

Good stuff!

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.  -- Meister Eckhart


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