tl;dr: A little hump day humor at the expense of cargo-cult agileistas everywhere.
User Story
As a product manager, I want to avoid prescriptive approaches to Agile.
Description
This past April at the TriAgile conference in Raleigh, I had the pleasure of listening to David Hussman give warning to the perils that await those who insist on practicing a prescriptive approach to Agile.
Later the same day, I sat at the same table for lunch as Mr. Hussman, myself making cracks about zealots who view Agile more as a formulaic set of pre-defined patterns than an intrinsic value system.
During the drive home I was struck with a possibly more memorable — and hopefully more entertaining — way of presenting some of the same points.
I tweeted out a series of these this past May.
UATs
So with apologies Jeff Foxworthy for a shameless rip-off of his ‘You Might be a Redneck’ schtick, I offer up the following as possible touch-point tests to determine …
… you might be a HyperScrumDamentalist if …
- You believe the singular act of holding morning-stand-ups makes you Agile.
- You find yourself obsessively straightening the PostIt notes on your Kanban board.
- You catch yourself rejecting tickets solely on the basis formatting and/or grammar.
- You hear yourself arguing process with an appeal to authority such as “… but Bob Galen says …”
- You spot in your backlog a story titled ‘Install Usability.’
- You relegate the role of product manager to simply that of a JIRA-Slinging Ticket-Monkey.
- You believe that SAFe® is the infallible word of Scrum.
- You hear yourself name-dropping ‘The Scrum Guide’ as one might cast a spell or invoke a magic incantation.
- You find yourself in HR after freaking out because you ran out of powder pink PostIt notes exclusively used to denote DevOps tasks.
- You catch yourself prescribing individual team member positions for stand-ups using blue tape markers on the floor, each bearing a specific team member name — in which case — you are most certainly a Cargo-Cult HyperScrumDamentalist!
Discussion
Ok, first a disclaimer. The above opinions are mine and mine alone … and published back on September 2, 2015.
Moreover, I’m currently and awesomely blessed to be working with a very effective and highly functional scrum team. Perhaps that’s why I can sit back and laugh at smart-aleck remarks that might make other product managers consider a career switch to that of a lion tamer and/or Wal-Mart greeter.
That said, please feel free to contribute to the above list, either with improving any of my points … or by offering insights of your own.