Thanks for sharing these perspectives. Good mental food to “nom” on. My rant: Isn’t the whole point of Agile to: get alignment with product team, deliver small, prioritized incremental value, respond to feedback, evaluate, rinse and repeat? Forgive the breezy comment but, isn’t it just about finding what works to meets goals in the ecology of the environment within which the project takes place?

Here’s a joke meant purely for fun:

What’s the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist? …You can negotiate with a terrorist! BAM! OWW! Thanks, I’ll be here all week.

>> What matters is what ideas we apply skillfully and wisely to our situation in order to improve it.

Ron, I couldn’t agree more, the value is your experience and having a variety of tools to apply given the situation. Defending named clouds is wasteful.

Thanks for coming up with a name for this phenomenon ;)
I agree Named Cloud clashes waste a lot of time, I prefer to spend time talking about what teams can do rather than the provenance of the terminology.

I find the same thing – I actually try to ‘genericize’ the terms I use as much as possible to avoid the discussion about which methods to use. As Lisa Crispin says “Hopefully, in the future we call it a good way to develop software:.

Ron, I read this because David Anderson pointed it out to me.

I do not believe you are at all dogmatic (really, passion and dogmatism are different).

But please explain why your cloud has certification – implying it is better? And please explain why your cloud (or I should say, the community, dare I say tribe, from which you make some of your living) bans people?

Wise words.

What does this wisdom tell us about the
Certified Scrum Trainer® a role of that cloud-naming, cloud-promoting organisation the Scrum Alliance??

@ Keith Braithwaite:

I think my mission is to go where the questions are, and to speak the truth as I understand it. It seems to be working fairly well so far.

As a CST I have the responsibility to give the participants all that I can on the subject of how to do software development well. I find that they are interested in learning that material and that they generally rate the class as quite useful.

@ alshall:

First, the logic: Offering certification does not imply that one topic area is better than another. Does the fact that PMI offers certification imply that the PMI’s ideas are best? I hope to hell not.

Second, the question of why Scrum offers certification: As I see it, certification is a way of marketing ideas, and it has turned out to be a very good one in the case of Scrum.

Third, one might wonder why I would take part in this. The answers are two: My class is a good way of helping interested people do better with software development, and I make a little money at it, which permits me to continue to do what I do. See also my reply to Keith, above.

Fourth, as to why the cloud, community, tribe bans people: The cloud, community, tribe do not ban people. Ken Schwaber, an individual, has banned some people from the Scrum Development list, including you, and me. To the best of my knowledge he does that when people persist in asking questions that he thinks are inappropriate to the mailing list. As he is the moderator of that list, that is his right. It may reflect upon him but it does not reflect on the community at large.

Finally, let me refer you again to the story of the monks who encounter a woman who needs to cross the stream. I put her down a long time ago, and I recommend the same to you.

Thanks for stopping by!

Nice post Ron. i so agree…your name cloud metaphor is similar to how some promote their way as “the” way. Or, to use a given “best practice”.

There are no “best” practices, me-htinks. rather, good practices applied practically and appropriately.

thanks for bringing this to the surface,
~ ellen

Good post Ron. It’s a shame that the usual suspects take this as an opportunity to do more CSM-bashing. The CSM program has benefited multitudes of people, it has helped spread Agile thinking far more widely than any other named thing, including Agile itself.

I do feel there is value in naming things. It isn’t just about wanting to be better than another named thing, it is about creating identity. I associate myself with Scrum, because everything about it, including its ludicrous name, speaks to me of irreverence, of improved personal relationships at work, of true self-organization, of trust and courage.

As soon as people talk of Scrum as a process they have lost the plot. It isn’t. It is a mindset, a way of thinking and behaving that fundamentally challenges everything we have previously thought was correct. I don’t see Kanban having that same change-the-world focus, it seems to be about moving cards across a wall (I guess I may be missing some detail, but really I don’t hear much else about Kanban).

Scrum might be a named cloud, some day to dissolve, but while it is here it is very beautiful to behold.

Nice article, Totally agree.

Too often people miss the point. It is a set of technique that is meant to be adapted as appropriate for the situation. You know, that ole hammer / nail thing. Oops maybe it is a screw.

I largely disagree with the tenets of most – but not all – of the new methodologies, but man, I’m sure on board with this post. Do what’s good for the organization. Somebody think of the children!

“Who the hell cares???”

hahaha, thank you! I think sometimes it’s easier to blindly follow a cloud because it already exists (someone has already figured out the rules for us) then it is to stop and THINK about what is actually best for us at this particular point in time.

Thanks for the reminder that thinking & adapting is always the Right Answer :-)

To me what Ron says is pretty obvious. It is really hard to understand (IMHO) how people can fight against Scrum, using Kanban or XP, and vice versa. Environment and Context rule them all. Adaptation is a key. “Who the hell cares” is a really good phrase :) You should adapt to your environment and focus on productivity improvement. When you have this focus, you should be creative finding weak areas and fixing them. That is a natural approach for any software development team.

Scrum and XP just provide a good set of practices/roles/rules to start with. Then you should forget about strict methodology and follow your goal (super-productive development team).

Scrum articulates some capabilities that teams have used to successfully deliver software products. XP has some of the same capabilities and a whole set of engineering capabilities that other teams have used. These two are often used together to great success. Kanban actually has some new capabilities and implements some of the other capabilities differently. Kanban is not completely distinct in every capability from Scrum, XP, and all the other agile methods. But Kanban has some specific differences in the implementation of several capabilities. These differences should be explored and clarified for the community.

An important part of naming is that it leads to understanding. Without naming we can’t build a shared understanding of what we are doing and grow our knowledge. The real value is going to come when we start specifying the capabilities, the distinctions in specific implementations, and start figuring out what works best in which contexts.

As an aside @ronjeffries I see some humor in slamming the named cloud PMI. Is PMI the best? “I hope the hell not.” Naming the things that need to be done to run a project is helpful. To some extent, PMI has an understanding that they are naming what’s needs to be done and not prescribing how’s. While often implemented desctructively, the what focus creates some space for context specific discussion.