Things that are new and shiny over things that are proven and effective

Slogans and promises over working software

Methodologies and practices over individuals and innovation

Certifications over common sense and aptitude

Group think over critical thought

We Commit

To choosing whichever methodology makes the most grandiose promises

To continue to create new unproven methodologies to keep the certification mills humming

To reject metrics as a measure of success and to continue to create new unproven methodologies so there will be always something new that metrics can’t be applied to

To tithe 10% of our earnings annually to certifications mills, lest our certs be revoked

http://agileforest.com/2012/01/23/frequency-foundation-and-agile/

Reading the primary documents (the Photo Analysis.pdf) is enlightening.  It is such junk science any high school science maven could debunk most of it in a few minutes.

But what does it have to do with Agile?

Well, here is what I see the similarities being:

1) Scrum is just the idea of Sutherland and to some degree Schwaber. Similar to the Rife Frequencies just being an idea — there is no proof that either works, yet Sutherland sells both

2) Most of the “evidence” — such as there is — that scrum works at all is due to Sutherlands work at a number of companies and it’s widely quoted. But we can see from his “work” at Frequency Foundation that his claims must be taken with a very large dose of skepticism

3) The Rife folks appear to be preying on desperate people hoping for a silver bullet to cure their ills. And Scrum (IMHO) is preying on desperate managers hoping for a silver bullet

4) The Rife stuff -is  pseudomedicine and the Scrum stuff is simplistic pseudomanagement.

I used to think there was a certain tin foil hat element to the Scrumentology business but we can see that at least one high level Scrum lord is way beyond tin foil hats and e-meters.

The FrequencyFoundation site actually talks about chem trails and healing pets from dirty electricity!

Reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience I can see parallels to both FF and Scrum (there is a Scrumfoundation as well  – coincidence?).

Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims

• Assertion of scientific claims that are vague rather than precise, and that lack specific measurements.^[42]
• Failure to make use of operational definitions (i.e. publicly accessible definitions of the variables, terms, or objects of interest so that persons other than the definer can independently measure or test them).^[43] (See also: Reproducibility)
• Failure to make reasonable use of the principle of parsimony, i.e. failing to seek an explanation that requires the fewest possible additional assumptions when multiple viable explanations are possible (see: Occam’s razor)^[44]
• Use of obscurantist language, and use of apparently technical jargon in an effort to give claims the superficial trappings of science.
• …etc

Personalization of issues

• Tight social groups and authoritarian personality, suppression of dissent, and groupthink can enhance the adoption of beliefs that have no rational basis. In attempting to confirm their beliefs, the group tends to identify their critics as enemies.^[61]
• Assertion of claims of a conspiracy on the part of the scientific community to suppress the results.^[62]
• Attacking the motives or character of anyone who questions the claims (see Ad hominem fallacy).^[63]

Use of misleading language

• Creating scientific-sounding terms in order to add weight to claims and persuade non-experts to believe statements that may be false or meaningless. For example, a long-standing hoax refers to water by the rarely used formal name “dihydrogen monoxide” (DHMO) and describes it as the main constituent in most poisonous solutions to show how easily the general public can be misled.
• Using established terms in idiosyncratic ways, thereby demonstrating unfamiliarity with mainstream work in the discipline

The Scrum community has worked hard to erode their credibility for a long time, from bogus certifications, to lack of supporting evidence, to infighting between various camps, to outright censorship of dissenters.

What little credibility they had left, is now gone.

Jordan

The Good

• More and more organizations are taking an overall holistic look at project management and not merely following the latest new buzzword
• Agile “mashups”, aka “Pragmatic Agile” and “Post Agilism”, and Hybrid Approaches are becoming more mainstream versus dogmatic one dimensional adoptions
• More people are openly critical of various aspects of the Agile marketplace, from practices, to profiteering. In the past many people were too intimidated to question the sacred methodologies. The gloves are off, and have been for many months in the agile debates at this point, and frank criticism is replacing fawning gushing as the norm in the blogosphere
• Scrum and XP, and to some extent Kanban have jumped the shark. XP is nearly nonexistant in the landscape, and Scrum adoption has nowhere to go but down at this point
• Fracturing of Agile (see below) will lead to more independent thinking, and less “me too” parroting of simplistic methodologies; more emphasis being paid to fitting the project and methodology, versus a one size fits all approach 

The Bad

• Most of the agile landscape is still sloganeering and profiteering; a few favored practices combined with the hard sell; new fads replace the old fads
• Too much emphasis on estimating tasks to the millisecond
• Too much emphasis on doing instead of thinking, innovating, and creating

The Ugly

• Few if any unbiased, independent success stories, especially in relationship to Scrum, despite it being widely adopted and nearly 20 years old. Most if not all ”success” stories quoted in “papers” stem from companies controlled by one of the Scrum founders. Lack of success equates to failure, especially when it fails to succeed, and organizations are noticing this readily
• More and more companies enter the certification game: Why? Profiteering
• Outlandish claims such as “Hyper-Productivity” have greatly eroded trust in not only the “thought leaders” that make them, but the industry as a whole
• Scrum versus Kanban wars — how dare you impinge on our profits! Both sides attacking the others credibility and  profit motive. Agile versus Agile fighting will multiply as agile landscape fragments
• Process over People — Scrum becoming new PHB  process just for the sake of process; least innovative companies most excited about this new way to manage by checklist (see Jumping the shark above) – Burndown Charts supplant TPS Reporting
• Retrospectives all the rage; focus should be on getting management to listen, not holding retrospectives that do not result in action; many organizations dropping retrospectives since same issues brought up over and over.

And what about my predictions? Look for that in an upcoming post!

Jordan

Googling it seems many people are struggling with it; it seems like this is a catch all error, not necessarily related to unloaded domains.

What worked for me was to close ALL xaml editor windows in visual studio, and close all browser windows that have silverlight open.

 Then try the build and see if it works. Sometimes it may take 30-60 seconds before it works.  The key seems to be making sure there are no WPF or Silverlight classes loaded at ALL in the system, then try the build.

 Let me know if that works for you,

Jordan

 2) Make sure to use post its. Post its are still seen as very cool. Bright colored ones make you look important and organized when you stick them on the big board for the whole office to admire. Software may work better, yes, but people don’t see your monitors. Big boards and colorful post-its, are not only retro, but they give your team the visibility it craves so much, as well as brightening up an otherwise drab room.

 3) Make sure it has a stand up meeting. Stand up meetings just exude agility.  Inspecting the troops daily sends a huge chill up the spine of most managers as well. This helps get buy in from management (an important consideration).

 4) Make sure you use plenty of references to Japan, Toyota, and as many japanese words as possible.

    Korean and Chinese words won’t do. They must be Japanese for your new methodology to be successful.

    It doesn’t matter how much your methodology is based on any real Japanese method, just the mere claim that it has roots in Japan is enough to get the hipsters on board hook line and sinker.

 5) Rename common things (meetings, billboards, stickies) to new and exciting names for the same thing. If you tell your boss you want to put stickies on a billboard, he’ll yawn at you. If you tell him you’re setting up a kanban as an information radiator, you’ll be next in line for promotion. If you tell your team you want a daily meeting, they’ll hate you. Call it anything else (scrum, retrospective, kaigi, planning game), and they’ll line up as a herd in no time.

This mystique and BS angle cannot be overemphasized in terms of the successful uptake of your new methodology. In fact it is the core of your new methodology, and “unique” differentiation from everyone else. If you build a new mousetrap, noone will care. If you call it a Nezumi-tori they’ll sell by the shipload.

 6) It’s important to have a “master” or equivalent. Master is good because so many vague callings, like Reiki, and crystal healing, still have “masters”. Of course there is a Japanese word for master — “sensei” — but nearly everyone has heard that word and it isn’t impressive. Sure, Master sounds almost as corny but not as blatantly pandering. Be creative here. Try to think of something new!

 7) Remember, you’re not selling a methodology here. You’re changing the world. Make as many references to empowerment, change, saving the whales, whatever, that makes it seem like you’re not really selling the same old thing for 3x the price in a blatant attempt to just make a buck.

 8) Use #7 and #4 to harness the power of aging boomer era radicals. Not only do these people have a lot of time on their hands to go out and proselytize your new methodology on blogs, conferences and related, but protesting and grassroots campaigns are in their DNA. They were protesting at college, burning bras, and fighting against the  man — harness these minions to proselytize your new methodology. Get them on your side by talking about personal empowerment, fighting the man, and that your methodology is the newest cool thing with the tasty asian flavor.

 9) Demonize the opposition for not using your methodology; after all, how could they be, since you just invented it. Use FUD to promise that anyone who doesn’t follow you will fail. Keep in mind that there is scant to no evidence that any other methodology is all that successful, so don’t feel you need to provide any evidence either. Plenty of people take various methodologies on faith — they can do the same for yours.

Now that you know what to do, use these proven steps and have fun creating a new methodology, promoting it, and certifying people in it.

It’s the wild west out there, so go grab a bucket to catch the money raining into pop methodologies these days.

Jordan

There have been repeated requests, for success stories, both here on my blog, as well as on Agile Scout.

However, amazingly, no reports of success have been forthcoming as of this writing.

Look for a big pullback in 2012, especially related to Scrum, as the lack of tangible success reaches a tipping point relative to the hype.

Jordan

Note, this is SUPPOSED to be humorous, and of COURSE, there is absolutely NO ACTUAL RELATION TO ANY REAL PERSON OR ENTITY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED BY THIS STORY. Trust me

PLANET OF THE EXTREME PROGRAMMERS  – Copyright 2002-2012

A large starship streaks slowly across the sky. It appears to look like a
large conference table. Its’ enormous engines, powered by huge tanks of coffee
as the oxidizer, and prodigous amounts of chocolate donuts as the fuel seem to
fill the sky with their pungent aroma.

On the back can be seen a large bumper sticker that reads: “This baby turns
on a dime”

Dragged in by the powerful tractor beam, (not to mention the smell of Coffee
and Donuts), Ford and Arthur struggle helplessly as they draw closer to the
evil ship.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this…” Says Ford.
“Me too!” screams Arthur. “I’ve heard theres lots of XP activity in this
sector”

As they arrive on the shuttle deck, they are greeted by a gruff individual
who seems to be armed with  a futuristic laser weapon, adorned with flashing red and green lights.His badge reads “Uncle Brad”.

“Have you been programming in pairs?” asks the guard, gruffly.

“Ummmm” says Ford.
“Well….” says Arthur.

“We were just stopping in for a drink!” says Arthur.
“Or two” hissed Ford.

“I mean coffee” yelped Arthur.
“And donuts!” yelled Ford.

“Are you guys from Marketing?” asked the guard, gruffly.

“Umm….” says Ford.
“Well…” says Arthur.

“We’re customers!” says Ford. “See, and we need some donuts..and coffee”

“Terrific!” said Uncle Brad.

“We’ve been looking for customers. We used to have an on site customer, but
she…” and his voice trailed off.

“She what?” asked Arthur nervously.

“Oh nothing,” said Brad as he led them thru the ship.

They passed a large room filled with computers. In the center was a
conference table, where people were throwing around blank 3×5 cards at each
other, while nodding furiously.

There were lots of 3×5 cards stuck to the wall as well, but most of them
were blank, except some had large words on them like “Planet”, “Engine” and
“Coffee”.

“Errrm…who are they, and what are they doing?” asked Arthur.
“That’s our IT department.” said Brad proudly. “They’re playing the Planning
Game”

“What sort of Planning are they working on?” asked Ford.

“Oh, a Flight Control System”, said Brad.

“Ah what?” asked Ford and Arthur together, spitting coffee out their noses.

“FCS. You know. Flight Control System”, said Brad.

“We know what it is, but hasn’t this ship already got one?” said Ford.

“Errrr…no..” said Brad.

“I see…” said Ford.

“You see it’s all very complicated.” said Brad. “It’s supposed to be a test.
To see if we can build a flight control system. Ground control has already
launched us on what they call a “ballistic trajectory.” Our job is to try to
design a flight control system before we crash into any nearby planets” said
Brad nervously.

“Are you … sure.. it’s a test?” asked Ford slowly.

“What else could it be?” asked Brad.

“An exit strategy?” whispered Arthur into Ford’s ear.

“Umm, so what do you do around here?” said Ford trying to change the
subject.

“Oh, I coach the IT staff” said Brad, fingering his weapon proudly.

“I make sure they program in pairs. Bjork always said we should do it in
pairs”.

“Bjork?” asked Arthur.
“Bjork?” asked Ford.

“Bjork. Curt Bjork. The founder of our Methodology” said Brad reverently.
Then he launched into his tale: “For many generations, our IT staff wandered
lost in the cubicle prarie. They had been tasked to write a FCS, but after
trying for many years, they had absolutely nothing to show for it. After
pulling some strings with our financial people, L.Ron was able to hire Bjork
to teach us The Way of XP!” finished Brad triumpantly.

“Who’s L.Ron?” asked Arthur.

“He’s our Commodore” said Brad proudly, “… and he’s an OXP Level 6!”

“OXP?” said Ford, with difficulty.

“Operating XP-er. We used to call him an Operating Thetan, but we had to
change the name after the Dyanetix legal dept sent us a nasty letter,” said
Brad grimacing at the thought of the evil lawyers from Dyanetix.

“L. Ron, I want you to meet our new customers,” said Brad, wagging his tail
as he approached his master. “I found them in the hanger deck.”

“Hi!” said Arthur.
“Hi!” said Ford.

“Nice to meet you. I’m L. Ron. Care for a donut?” said L. Ron.

“Sure” said Ford and Arthur as they munched happily.

“I love the ones with extra sprinkles!” says L.Ron with a gleam in his eye.

“So show us your FCS software” said Arthur, munching happily on the glazed
sugar bomb.

L.Ron leads them over to a Sun workstation, with a really cool fog machine
and mood lighting setup nearby, and then demonstrates what appears to be a
game of Centipede running under X-Windows.

“It looks like Centipede” said Arthur.

“It IS Centipede” said L.Ron proudly. “But not just any centipede. Why,
first we wrote a 68020 emulator to emulate the hardware. Then we thought,
why just steal the ROM’s? Why not rewrite the game in FORTH? So we wrote it
in forth running emulated on the virtual arcade hardware under the Sun OS.
That was our earliest experience with what we later found out was called
‘Refactoring’ ” continued L. Ron.

“You see,” said L.Ron. “We weren’t ALWAYS working on an FCS. First we were
working on a payroll system. But the ship had one already. We almost
finished though. Got 30% of the way there. Frankly I’d call it a complete
success. But then the evil Political Machinators came down from the  Planet
DaimlerZoltar-GmbH. They unplugged the payroll system and terminated the budget.
It’s a good thing I had my tennis shoes on that day, lemme tell ya. So then
we thought we’d work on a series of arcade games for the in flight
entertainment system. But then our old people on the ship started talking
about this Ballistic Trajectory legend, and we thought we’d try our hand at
an FCS.” continued L.Ron.

“It was starting work on the FCS that led us to discover our Methodology”
said Brad.

“Methodology?” said Arthur.
“Methodology?” asked Ford.

“Yes. See, we had a problem. We had to be able to write a working FCS, but
none of us knew anything at all about the problem domain! And what’s worse,
this ship has no documentation. Zippo. So for many years we wandered lost in
the cubicle prarie. And then it hit me. I said to myself, ‘We have no one
here with knowledge of the problem domain. We have no documentation… And
our IT staff is strictly newbies. What we really need to save us is a
Methodology!” concluded L. Ron.

“A methodology” swooned Brad.
“A methodology” sang the IT staff in Chorus.

Then they all did the XP methodology Song and Dance like something from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and plunked back in their seats, (in pairs)
with a bang.

“to be continued….”

Which is correct?

Although the odor may be pungent, to me it seems correct that a Sprint marathon really is just a series of mini waterfalls, at least at the important levels.

Let’s see what they have in common:

1) The delivery date is clearly defined; in Waterfall, that delivery date may be months or years in the future, and in Scrum that delivery date may be the end of the current sprint, but either way, they are fixed. The only difference is the time scale. To me, they are the same in this regard (fixed delivery date)

2) Fixed scope during execution cycle; in Waterfall, the requirements are known up front and don’t change during the execution stage, however long that may be. In Scrum, the requirements for the current sprint is known up front, and change is not allowed (must reset sprint anew). In both cases, changing requirements during execution is unacceptable. Once again the only difference is the length of the execution period. Thus, they are the same in regards to their inflexibilty to incorporate change during an execution phase

3) Status Reports, Meetings, & More In waterfall, there would be weekly staff meetings, progress reports and the like. In scrum, the situation is the same; there are daily status meetings and burndown charts. Once again the only difference is the time scale

4) Sequential Execution In Scrum, (especially “Type A” Scrum), sprints are sequential and build upon earlier sprints. They do not overlap. This is no different from waterfall, where one phase is done before another and they happen sequentially. Either can choose whether to go horizontal or vertical during these phases.

5) Retrospectives In Waterfall, after a project there is a “post mortem” at the end of the execution phase to reflect on what went on and what to change in the future; in Scrum, there is a “retrospective” at the end of the execution phase (Sprint) with exactly the same goals. The difference? Once again, none beyond the time scale.

So, we can clearly see, that Scrum is not a radical, innovative, revolutionary approach. It is merely an evolutionary and reactionary approach that optimizes for short term planning, compared to waterfalls longer term planning type approach.

Scrum as a series of Mini Waterfalls? Yes, that does seem to be the case.

The relabelling of titles and frequent lip service to intangibles like “empowerment” do not change the overriding mini waterfall nature of the method; waterfall could and often does easily allow for self organization, freedom to choose tasks, etc.

The only tangible difference is short termism versus long termism, and if the waterfalls are “mini”, then they become equal in their short term outlook. To be absolutely clear, “mini waterfall” means one that is 1-4 weeks long.
Please understand that point — some commenters below seem to have missed it — I’m comparing it to a MINI (=short timeframe) waterfall.

Jordan

When I read agile blogs, 99% of the postings are category 2.

Joe Schmoe blogs about what the daily scrum is, how it takes 15 minutes, blah blah blah. Can’t people just read the scrum guide? It’s not necessary to have 10,000 parrots pasting the scrum guide into wordpress.

It to me is pathetic that so many people just regurgitate the 15 principles, or whatever, and what is it, search engine bait so they can shill themselves as Scrum Masters 2 weeks from now?

If you have nothing to say, other than parroting what others say, then you aren’t an independent thinker. You are a yes (wo)man. Maybe you can claim to be an agile yes (wo)man, but you’re just going with the status quo, mixing parrotism and fad-ism in one banal posting.

To quote David Byrne:

“When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed. Say something once, why say it again?”

Please — if you have something original to say, then say it. If you don’t, don’t hit the post button. It’s that simple.

Jordan

Additionally, Scrum is supposed to result in the release of product to the market rapidly, that “delights” customers and users.

So, do we have examples of such product that we are being delighted by, and has been rapidly delivered?

I’m looking to catalog evidence of Scrum being used to deliver product that is used in the broad marketplace; whether it’s iPhone, android, zynga or anything else that is mostly relevant (eg, not niche).

If you know of a Scrum success (or failure) feel free to post it.

Reports must at least show: The name of the product and company, how they used Scrum (with what if any modifications), and it’s relevance to software development.

To be fair and balanced, failure reports are also welcome with the same criterion.

Jordan