RE: Roll Your Own Agile?

I agree with that; under my definition you have to be incremental and experimental or you aren’t agile.

I’ve become a bit less excited about defined methodologies as a starting point, mostly because the adoption is neither incremental and experimental. I see a lot of what I call “frozen scrum” implementations; the team adopted scrum (or, more typically, scrum with some variations based on what management wants) as a plug-and-play replacement for their current process, and then they just stick with that exact process. I’ve been wondering that if you try to adopt your way in incrementally, you will end up with better understanding of individual practices and perhaps you end up with a culture that at least has some support for experimentation.


From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 2:07 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] Roll Your Own Agile?


I think there is a useful distinction between an eclectic method that picks and chooses the practices it likes and an evolutionary method that is adapted carefully to its context while keeping the knobs turned up on certain values and principles.

In practice it may be difficult to tell the difference, especially when you don’t know the history of how it evolved or the people who evolved it. However, I think most experienced coaches can be taught to tell them apart pretty quickly.


On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:54 PM, Eric Gunnerson [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Adam, can you explain why it matters?

From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>]
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 10:29 PM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] Roll Your Own Agile?



I know Woody and have a great deal of respect for him, but I bet if you asked him he would characterize his own approach as an evolution of XP and Lean and not as "roll your own..."

On Tuesday, November 24, 2015, Michael Wollin [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


I think what naturally (organically) evolved at Hunter Systems under the guiding hand of Woody Zuill qualifies. It features some variant of Kanban, mob programming, no estimates, and their own status tracking system.

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 11:06 AM, Charles Bradley - Professional Scrum Trainer and Coach [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> Has anyone out there in Scrum-land ever seen what you consider to be a good RYOA approach work out well for a company? Or is RYOA essentially a unicorn?