RE: Roll Your Own Agile?

Looking at the teams I’m most familiar with, the ones who are most successful – and meet my definition of agile (ie incremental and evolutionary in process) – aren’t starting at one of the defined approaches. They borrow from a number of sources, and I think Scrum is not the major source of their process.

The second group of teams are those that intend to adopt a methodology – and it’s always Scrum – directly. Their success depends on how well they do understanding what is important in scrum, but I haven’t seen any be as successful as the first group. They end up stuck in something that is pretty close to scrum – and they do get benefit from that – but I think they’re perplexed that they aren’t seeing more benefit.

The third – and largest group, unfortunately – is those that start with some version of Scrumbut, and I’m sure you already know how well those work out…

Eric
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2015 12:40 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] Roll Your Own Agile?


+1 and well said, Adam.

I realize that it's hard for anyone to draw a line between something that was "clean room" or "cooking from scratch" when it comes to RYOA, but I appreciate everyone trying to go with me on this thread.

What I've gathered here and elsewhere is that there is not a lot of evidence of RYOA (clean room, from scratch) existing, much less widely successful.  It seems that the vast majority of (team level) Agile in practice is based strongly on one of the well defined approaches -- or at least it evolved from one of them.
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Charles Bradley
Chief Executive Officer
Professional Scrum Trainer
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________________________________
From: "Adam Sroka [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT]" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 3:07 PM
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?