Jade Meskill:  Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Agile weekly podcast. I’m Jade Meskill.

Roy van de Water:  I’m Roy van de Water.

Derek Neighbors:  And I’m Derek Neighbors.

Agile Process Frameworks vs Individuals and Interactions

Jade:  I thought today, we’d talk about something, maybe a little controversial. Do we need frameworks?

Roy:  Like Rails?

Jade:  Maybe like Scrum. What do you guys think?

Derek:  No. Yes. No.

Jade:  OK.

Roy:  It’s one of those things where they’re helpful to get started by get in your way after a while, but you think they get in your way a lot sooner than they actually do.

Derek:  I like to say, if its individuals and their actions over process and tools. Why is it the first thing that we default to add to lists are hey, you need to learn a bunch of process? I think, no, they are not necessary.

However, it’s very hard to do things well if you don’t have any discipline. What process does is it allows you to learn how, as a team, to be disciplined about the work that you do. It helps highlight issues that you have that can help you improve. Basically it builds off of work that people have done before.

We know that all these things tend to really keep teams from performing well. If you’re not cross‑ctional, if you don’t have a concept of time boxing, if you don’t have a number of these things, you tend to struggle.

We’re going to go ahead and put those things before you. Learn how to use them, and as you learn how to use them, you can shed them away and probably still get really good results.

I’d say, yes and no, I don’t think you need process. Do I think that it’s hard to be good without having some guide rails to explore how you work? Yes.

Agile Process Frameworks as Guide Rails for Novices Only? (Dreyfus Model)

Roy:  I think some of it comes down to pragmatic thinking and learning talks a lot about the Dreyfus model and how early on you need rules because you don’t have enough knowledge to make your own decisions. But that rules ruin experts, and all these people that have lots of experience are now hindered by having to follow these rules when they should be trusting their intuition.

Derek:  People tend to find themselves being experts far before they’re really experts. That’s another problem there is. I call it the so fucking agile. We’re so fucking agile that we don’t need to do XYZ. I can turn on the dime. I can respond to anything. I was just like, Yeah, so you’re in chaos. That’s really great.

I don’t consider that agile. Never getting anything done because all you do is respond to every stimulus that comes your way does not make you good. It makes you undisciplined. I think that that’s difficult thing.

Roy:  I think that’s the careful distinction between thinking that you’ve arrived, that you’re there and that you’ve finished adapting Agile or whatever or finished improving and the idea of, I think I’ve grown these rules but I still need to improve and try new things all of the time because I’m not even close to where I want to be yet.

Derek:  Yeah, so the litmus test I use is if somebody believes that the rules don’t belong to them and they don’t want them. They’ll throw a fit if they have to follow rules, they’re probably not really a master. If somebody says, I think that these rules could be bent but I don’t really have a problem with the rules and if it’s going to cause you all sorts of grief to not adhere to these rules, then fine, I’ll adhere to them.

I generally find that’s the person that’s probably OK without actually having rules because what they’re saying is, I don’t think the rules hinder me so much that I can’t be effective, but I do think I know the rules well enough that when they need to be bent in certain ways, I could get more performance out of them.

Where the amateur tends to say, I just don’t want the rules at all. Any rules at all are going to hurt me.

Roy:  I agree with that.

Dumping Frameworks on Teams. More Helpful or Harmful?

Jade:  Part of my reason for asking this question is thinking about introducing new teams, new people and dumping this giant framework on their heads, let’s say Scrum. If I’m going from nothing to Scrum, that’s a lot of stuff to learn and take in. Does that hinder or help their ability to become more agile?

Derek:  I don’t know. So you do count them on if you don’t want to do that. I think that to me like what I’ve been…

[crosstalk]

Jade:  That’s even a lot to take on.

Derek:  Not really.

Jade:  To do right.

Derek:  The way that I look at it is, what do you want? If you want some immediate results, a framework like Scrums says, We’re going to be opinionated about a whole bunch of stuff because we know it works for most situations so just believe us and do it.

The benefit to that is you can actually get real benefit immediately by making those changes. The downside is, you have to make fundamental changes on how you work. For a lot of people that pisses them off and makes them turned off to the process so then, they want nothing to do with it. It doesn’t stick long term the minute that somebody says, OK, you don’t have to do, even if we’re getting great results from it, ultimately, we didn’t decide to do all those things.

The framework tools we had to do them so I’m going to throw them away the first chance somebody will let me where I tend to say that people that have a little bit more time, can explore. You do something more like Kanban. Just do what you’ve always been doing, visualize it and start to ask yourself how we can improve, improve over time.

That’s a lot less hostile. People will tend to get to the same place that they get to in scrum a lot of times, but they get there over the course of months or years. They totally own it, because they’re the ones that made all those decisions.

I had a team the other day. One of them was doing the work of what I would call the scrum master. The other person said, We created our own rule for a Kanban, it’s called the … [inaudible 06:06 ] Nanny.’

It was the person that was helping organize the work with outside parties and working with the product owner and managing a lot of the stuff that developers didn’t want to really be doing, but needed it to happen.

I thought it was kind of ny that after a couple of months of Kanban, they had really implemented the equivalent of a scrum master.

Not because they wanted to emulate the scrum master. It was just that somebody stepped into the role of doing that and people could tell there was a different role than the developer.

I don’t think it’s necessary. I think it can hurt or help.

If you want some immediate gains, if you believe in cross‑functionality and you believe in time‑box and being able to estimate or have some predictable delivery or really important and you want to get that right away. I think scrum can give you those things right away. It might piss people of in the process and turn them off to Agile in general. That’s a possibility.

Jade:  When have you seen the best results?

Derek:  I see the best results when it’s a hybrid.

You don’t necessarily force. You have to do all these things, but you do some kind of principle‑based stuff. I almost think of it like scrum is the best idea of how I would deal with this, but if you have a different way to deal with this, fine let’s deal with this in a different way.

I think that time‑boxing of iterations is a really good way to force feedback in some regular thing. If you’ve got a better way than that form of time‑boxing to do something, cool. Let’s look at it.

More often than not people, given them the choices, just give a better way to do it. Let’s hear it. Very mature, so they don’t know. They’re like, OK, let’s do that, because I don’t have a better way.

Sometimes they come up with a better way like, I think we can do this instead.

Jade:  You’re showing them the facts, but then saying, It’s your choice. If you’ve got a better idea, we’ll support the best idea.

Derek:  Right.

Roy:  That sounds reasonable. It goes really hard to argue with too.

Derek:  It’s about not being dogmatic. At the end of the day, we just want results. As long as we’re all OK with the results.

Roy:  If you can manage to get awesome results with Waterfall, then by all means.

Derek:  To me, with cross‑functionality, people get really hung‑up on it. I like to switch it more toward shared commitment. As long as we’re all shared in the commitment and that any of us are willing to do the work and all of us are part of that, I’m OK with not necessarily calling it cross‑functionality.

It’s impossible to get that result and to have shared commitment without having some level of cros