Thoughts from Jeff and JJ Sutherland’s Talk on “30 Years of Scrum”
Yesterday, Jeff and JJ Sutherland conducted a webinar on “30 Years of Scrum.“ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBA572gzOpg) One thing Jeff said struck me in particular as he pointed out the “secret sauce” realized in Scrum practice both for his team (which wasn’t even called Scrum initially until they read the Takeuchi and Nonaka paper — https://hbr.org/1986/01/the-new-new-product-development-game) and team experience at Google.
What I found interesting was technical practices being emphasized since my early Scrum (Master) training (from Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn) did not address this. Also, the Scrum Guide editions have never mentioned specific technical practices. I’ve also heard Ken say on a couple occasions as to why: “we didn’t want to tell people how to do their jobs.” Of course, this has allowed Scrum to move beyond software development, though a huge percentage is still focused on software.
Now I have heard there was an early debate about including technical practice advice in Scrum and that Ken’s stance won out. Thus, it is interesting that Jeff mentioned technical practice as the “secret sauce.”
The “secret” (learned by Google and later communicated to Jeff when they said they were no longer doing Scrum) was a discipline at daily meetings where a developer ready to do work was expected to take on the top item in the backlog. If they didn’t know how to do (all of) it, they would need to learn. Over time, everyone knew how to do everything and understood the entire system. This meant the team would learn to see the entire system and would say “what should we work on today that will allow us to add a new feature” quickly.
This meant that Goggle worked to develop every developer to become a full-stack developer. Initially, they weren’t but the that board knowledge across the team was what other companies said was the “secret sauce” because the team had the freedom to bring in all the knowledge and make the entire team more high-performing than the people individually
Jeff noted that systems evolve in jumps through “punctuated equilibrium” (biology term). Small changes in the right places in a system allow the new features to “pop out.”
He also mentioned that, after his team’s first one-month Sprint (which he said was too long) and a bad end of Sprint demo, Jeff asked them to institute a demo every week to engineers from other, even competitive, companies. If you want to be an excellent tennis player, he said, you must play against excellent tennis players, learning from that. If not, then play with those less skillful, but you won’t grow.
Another this his team did was to read many papers about what people were doing (including the Takeuchi and Nonaka paper). Through this they learned, for example, that Borland had a daily meeting that Jeff’s team did not have. So, they added this, using it to understand how to move things along.
In all, it was an interesting look back on Scrum’s history, and then a view to what might be next, including the impact of AI.
