Give Thanks for Scrum 2017

This was my first time at this event, and my second time at an Agile Boston event (I recognized a couple of people from the last one I attended). I went with one of my coworkers, which turned out to be a good thing, as one of my criticisms of the event is that it wasn't well set up for meeting people.

There was a sort of ice-breaker thing halfway through the morning -- everyone got a piece of a playing card and was supposed to find the person with the other piece -- but with two hundred-some people in a single very loud room, I don't think it was a success. During most of the breaks, the two of us went for a walk; fresh air and a change of view becomes very important in such an environment.

The programming was interesting. The overall theme was around using Scrum in non-software environments. There was also a lot of talk about scaling. When it comes to scaling agile methods, I am an interested skeptic, partly because I have a strong bias against pretty much anything that happens at large scale. That aside, the more layers of communication you have, the more noise creeps in, and the idea that a "scrum of scrum of scrums" could really function -- well, it surprises me. I will take them at their word, but its not a task I would personally take on. As much as I appreciate Scrum, as the day went on, I found that I would have liked to hear an alternate viewpoint to the Scrum is the Way, the Truth etc. model that suffused the event.

There were a lot of interesting nuggets in the presentations, though, and I will try to encapsulate some of them here: 

• Scaling agile means getting it right on the small scale first, then expanding from there -- descale in order to scale successfully.
• 30% of the projects on your list are probably a waste of time.
• No matter how many layers of Scrum you have, ship at the end of the sprint (at least). 
• Lack of agility at the leadership level is a common blocker
• Agile as an operating system. 
• Managing globally distributed teams: "Let's take something complicated and make it even harder!" 
• How do you measure a Scrum team in dollars? Don't.
• There are a whole lot of busted agile implementations out there. 
• "Nobody is allowed to tell anybody to do anything." Jeff
• An organization is only as fast as its feedback/recovery cycle. 
• We invest in avoiding problems rather than growing the resilience to deal with them. 
• There are no best practices. 
• Leadership should adopt Scrum first. 

The final two sessions were more rah-rah than informative. There was a macho undertone to the event that I found, well, interesting. There was only one woman speaker, and the audience was considerably more diverse than the presenters. The examples used of companies implementing Scrum in these unorthodox, all-pervasive ways included Tesla, SpaceX, and Saab -- makers of things that go fast and blow stuff up, in the case of the Saab fighter planes -- 3M (engineering), and Valve (everyone loves Valve). Pictures of engineering workspaces showed all-male teams. Jeff Sutherland twice mentioned someone's martial arts expertise as relevant to his (it was a man both times) work as a Scrum Master. I found it rather off-putting.

I think it was a day well spent. It's generally a good idea to get out there and see what people outside of my own small niche are doing, and to connect with that community energy.