I made a promise to myself, each time I have a great training with a wonderful teacher, to write about it. But there is a catch. I must wait for at least one year to see how it impacted my life, both the training and the teacher.
Last year I participated in Athens at two Scrum training classes, Scrum Master and Product Owner one. This year, in spring, I had an online class about Scrum Patterns.
Premises and Context
There were some things that preceded the classes which, I believe, are worth mentioning. Context matters, a lot. So:
– I knew about James Coplien’s work. And by work I mean: programming, software architecture, Scrum, patterns, management, organizations;
– Before the first class it appeared feasible that I might be a Scrum Master at a certain company. And I said to myself that if I will have this honor, then I should go and learn from someone I respected;
– I said ‘architecture’. This was a very important detail. I would have liked to speak with him for 30 minutes about DCI(Data Context Interaction). You cannot imagine the torment I had and have about this topic which is so important for IT;
– I like programming. I also like testing, as envisioned by Jerry Weinberg (1);
– What I witnessed with managers, scrum masters, companies, clients, teams is that Scrum was not understood. What amazed me was that it was not understood especially by those who considered themselves as Scrum advocates, who were doing coaching/presentations/setting up Scrum, etc. I wish to say something has changed in all these years but I do not have this impression;
Details about the courses
I will try to write about this experience via 3 dimensions. I do this because there are different type of persons which might search or be interested in different kind of information:
–structure: the flow of the classes in those days;
–key words: as I have done it before, I was curious how I can describe these trainings via some keywords used;
–pearls of wisdom: these are insights from the training, words used by James Coplien. You will see that each of the text is within quotes and preceded and followed by “….”. This is because the text has a context(story, experience, people, time, history, feelings, exercise, place). It took James Coplien a good period of time to decipher these. So there is a risk, for the reader, not to decipher the real meaning/lesson/message. I put them there in the hope that it will convince the reader to go at his trainings and find out more;
Structure
Here is the course outline for the Scrum Master course:What is Scrum?
– Scrum history
– Scrum theory, Concepts, Practices
– Sprint Planning
– Production and Sprints
– Velocity game
– Overcoming impediments
– Management distribution and scaling
– Engineering tools and Practices
Here is the course outline for the Product Owner course:Intro to Scrum
– Your job
– The Vision
– Build an organization
– How the product backlog works
– Running the business with a Product Backlog
– Kaizen mind
At first glance it seems just classic Scrum stuff. But no, imagine that all the details/courses were explained/done in a red pill way(2): ”… I can teach you this course in one of 2 ways. One is that you can go back and we’ll call you a Scrum Master, even though you are a project manager. No change to the organization, do the Daily Scrum and say you do Scrum. That’s called the blue pill Scrum …”
Each time a student had a doubt or posed a question, James stopped and clarified. I would have liked to say that there were only fluffy bunnies but no, only cold showers. I have seen ‘senior’ SM or PO who remained speechless, as if everything they knew no longer applied.
Keywords
There were lots of topics discussed in the courses and I did not know how to describe it in a short and coherent way. But also I hope that these words will trigger a further search in context of Scrum and James Coplien. So:
Japan; Toyota Production System; deep japanese culture; zen buddhism; courage; we can’t predict; (prediction) in software; nature; human kind; harmonizing; value; outcome; self organization; type A,B,C Scrum; respect; consensus; timebox; kaizen; hansei; mura; muda; muri; Scrum scaling; emergent requirements; mercenary developers; enabling specification; trust; continual, not continuous, improvement; chief engineer in Toyota; kaikaku; ISO 9001; proxy product owner; quality Sprint; testing (advising the students to read ‘Lessons Learned in Software Testing’ book ); complex adaptive systems; waste; kanban; productivity
Pearls of wisdom
As I said it is important to mention that these phrases do not have context around them. This is intentional. It is an invitation to dig more, to go to the course. So:
-”… Scrum is not about replacing the Project manager with Scrum Master and the Product Manager with a Product Owner and doing daily Scrum. Is turning the company upside down …”
-”…A lot of Scrum trainers do not understand Scrum…”
-”… Taught right, Scrum is a lot like aikido, it’s a way of life. So is not just about how you do things at work, but how you relate with other people; it’s a world view from how the world works and how we work together…”
-”…Does a complex adaptive system have a root cause?…”
-”…Productivity is the number one cause of waste…”
-”…There is no user story in Scrum…”
– Student: “My team is distributed in 2 continents”
James Coplien: “…Teams are collocated…”
– “…You can’t promise you will deliver anything in a Sprint…”
-”…we never say commit to a schedule or commit to the content of the Sprint backlog but you are committed to your team…”
-”…You don’t have a chance of prediction in a complex phenomenon…”
-”…No Jira in Scrum…”
-”…Scrum is about controlled failure. Is not going to put you in a happy buble.Is going to make problems visible. Scrum is going to cause you so much pain. There is no magic here, just hard work…”
-”…Outsourced Product Owner is total bullshit…”
-”…Don’t you ever have a quality Sprint, every Sprint is a quality Sprint…”
-”…It’s about people. People working together…”
-”…This myth that it takes a lot of people to build a big product is a myth. Why do we scale? Because we can…”
-”…The Scrum Master is the single wrenchable neck for the team’s delivery…”
-”… The goal is not to do Scrum; at Ri you drop Scrum …”
-”…Please tell me you are not doing SAFe…”
-”…The point is that Product Owners do not work in Sprints. They have a continuous process of market research, exploration,…”
How it helped me
Before all these classes I felt things were wrong on how Scrum was introduced, taught, spoke, presented, imposed, described. But now I know…
I was amazed by the deep things learned about Scrum for the first time, so in 6 months I was in Athena to take the Product Owner class. Also this year I had the Scrum Patterns class.
When I decided to take the first class I wanted/desired so much also to speak, for some moments, with him about DCI. Of course when possible. And we spoke(in breaks, at dinners) … about DCI, but also about Jerry Weinberg, life, Retsina wine, recruiting, unit checking, scaling, dedication, Alistair Cockburn, OOP, architecture, honesty, Heidegger,…
Next on my list: DCI class(I hope he will make it, I am waiting for it for years), and again Scrum Patterns class.
(1) Jerry Weinberg, https://leanpub.com/u/jerryweinberg
(2) Blue Pill or Red Pill – The Matrix (2/9) Movie CLIP (1999) HD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7PKRjrid4&feature=youtu.be&t=81