The Scrum Mother

It started out as a typo, then it became a joke, then I began thinking that there might have been something interesting behind the joke.

One of the common pitfalls, when applying Scrum is to choose the wrong person as a scrum master. It turns out that this is quite a common situation, for many reasons. A company willing to adopt Scrum will probably select some of its best people to take a Scrum Master Certification or a generic Scrum Training. Before knowing what Scrum is about and what the Scrum Master role is responsible for, in practice, the selection criteria that a company will adopt would very probably be based on the traditional system of values of the company itself. Which would not match some of the key values of Scrum itself.

Despite the word “master” a Scrum Master is not given any real “power” on the team, a SM is not supposed to decide anything. It’s a supporting role, which can be rotated among different members of the team. Choosing the project manager or the team leader as a SM simply won’t work because old habits and roles will keep on sneaking in, preventing the Scrum magic (making the team self-organize efficiently) to happen.

A different set of qualities
Software companies often evaluate their employees in terms of technical skills, problem solving or leadership attitudes. These are not really the most interesting skills for being a successful scrum master. A good scrum master governs the process but does not have an active role in technical decisions. So being the best coder in town does not make you the best candidate for being a scrum master, instead, it probably stands in the way.
Qualities needed are probably more related to a feminine approach rather than the typical testosterone-driven competitive approach of many coders. Unfortunately these qualities do not always appear in individual performance evaluations, because are more related to the overall team behavior, rather than individual.

The traditional Italian team
It turned out that in Italy there is a quite common team which is ruled by a similar set of practices. It’s called “family” and the mother - the “mamma” - plays a key role in keeping everything working.
Meetings (called lunch or dinner) happen every day at a given hour. Every member of the family is supposed to show up at least right before that.
Mamma’s efforts are generally targeted towards the meeting preparation. They prepare the food, fetch the ingredients and set up the meeting room.
Mammas are generally checking everybody’s look and mood, to ensure everything is right. If, for any reason, something is not right, there’s no way to escape a one-on-one meeting about that.
At the end of every week there is a larger lunch with members of other teams involved (generally called “relatives”). A little more of ceremony is involved, but the basic idea is to keep all the teams in sync.
Mammas are working hard, but many times they are not bringing home any money.
If fights arises between team members, mammas act as peacemakers, preserving team harmony ant any cost.

Ok, I guess the last part will sound like a lot of stereotypes... it is. In many places this type of family no longer exists. Also, this is at odds with women rights, so I need to make it clear that I am not advocating this type of family. I am merely trying to have some fun stating that some of the key scrum practices are not new at all, they’re probably patterns that existed long before. Some of this patterns can be found in the traditional Italian family and helped preserve the team in terms of unity and sense of membership for ages.

Dilbert on Agile

Agile is really making it to the mainstream! Also Dilbert now is talking about it...

Incoming bestsellers

After a dinner with Chris and Miquel we ended up with a bunch of titles for potential bestsellers.

• Binge Coding, when too much is just enough
  
• Glamour Programming (ok …I am recycling here…)
  
• Beer Driven Development
  
• Unintentional Programming, Oh bollocks!
  
• The Dogmatic Programmer, It's my way or the highway, buddy!
  

I took pictures of the potential covers, but lame camera, low light and a straight firm hand made them definitely not worth publishing. Let's see if I can come up with something better with a drawing tool…

Tags: JAOO2007, Humour

A prophecy come true

While working for the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs, on a social registry data exchange application, we faced the topic of validation rules applied to birth names according to the Italian law. I challenged the application submitting "boundary values" for names, while studying the law. So I discovered that Obi Wan Kenobi is a legal name while 2Kool, D3PO or C1P8 are not. Chewbacca is fine. Giulia and Julia are both allowed, while Juli@ is not. As always, anyway, the Italian law is open to different interpretations, cause it states that you can't give ridiculous or shameful names to your babies, but avoids to define what is exactly ridiculous or shameful.

Colleagues looked at me in strange ways (it often happens), but today I've got the proof that my concerns were right, somebody in China tried to call the son the name '@'… Read the Article (in Italian).

Tags: software development, Italy, humour

The IT Communication Gap

As always, James McGovern got it right... check this

Tags: enterprise architecture, humour

UserFriendly Strip Comments

Found this some days ago, while browsing Raymond Chen's blog. It's not that far from reality...

UserFriendly Strip

Dumbest sentences heard

I’ll mantain a list of the dumbest phrases I encountered in my job experience. If you recognize yourself in the author… I owe you a beer!

“Hi, I sent you an e-mail with three different version of the xxx.java source enclosed. One of them actually works. Can you please deploy the right one in production, please?”

- a developer -

“Believe me, you do not want an integrated test environment: if something goes wrong you’ll never understand where the problem is…”

- a guy trying to deny the importance of the test environment they “forgot” to provide -

“We just discovered that we are 60 use cases late…”

- a project manager at a milestone meeting -

“Today’s standards are tomorrow obsolescences”

- a guy trying to justify the choice of a custom protocol instead of a standard one, on a large scale integration project -

Tags: humour, Software Development