Saturday, April 18, 2009
Enterprise Architecture, SCRUM and Agile Ceremonies
What happens when you combine the thinking of enterprise architecture with partial adoption of SCRUM, you get something along the lines of making chocolate chip cookies but without the chocolate chips...
I was talking to an architect down the road and realized that the buzzword of SCRUM is the latest word to be abused in large enterprises. When folks are talking about SCRUM, they are talking about socialization constructs and not necessarily management practices. All of the agile methods advocate the principle that everything is important but something is more important yet most enterprise architects have no framework that guides them in this regard.
The interesting observation I have noted is that the enterprise architects that still dabble in code have a fundamentally different perspective on the enterprise version of SCRUM than those who no longer code. One can find the results of enterprise SCRUM processes to feel a lot like cowboy coding where folks downstream areforcedencouraged to maintain 200,000 lines of undocumented comment-free code.
SCRUM is also used to hold enterprise participants hostage. Getting off a project that you didn't much care for to work on something fun, only to be repeatedly dragged back for firefighting is amplified since it requires co-location. The enterprise decision making process has always been sporadic but enterprise scrum makes this even worse. I bet you may have noticed that many of the technical decisions in enterprise scrum are made by the least technical person...
| | View blog reactionsI was talking to an architect down the road and realized that the buzzword of SCRUM is the latest word to be abused in large enterprises. When folks are talking about SCRUM, they are talking about socialization constructs and not necessarily management practices. All of the agile methods advocate the principle that everything is important but something is more important yet most enterprise architects have no framework that guides them in this regard.
The interesting observation I have noted is that the enterprise architects that still dabble in code have a fundamentally different perspective on the enterprise version of SCRUM than those who no longer code. One can find the results of enterprise SCRUM processes to feel a lot like cowboy coding where folks downstream are
SCRUM is also used to hold enterprise participants hostage. Getting off a project that you didn't much care for to work on something fun, only to be repeatedly dragged back for firefighting is amplified since it requires co-location. The enterprise decision making process has always been sporadic but enterprise scrum makes this even worse. I bet you may have noticed that many of the technical decisions in enterprise scrum are made by the least technical person...
