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in reply to Re: Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part V): Meetings
in thread Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part V): Meetings

While I mostly agree with you, there is one important aspect of what Scrum is:

Most of the scrum BS is targetted at the developers morale, I mean, it looks like theater because it is meant to be. The idea is that the young developers, eager to be part of a cool project, take part of entertaining project events, such as the poker play or other theatrical parts of the scrum methodology.

Of course more experienced developers know this is bullshit and they usually want to skip it, the ScrumMaster (a good one) should know this is bullshit but he should also know that the bullshit is important to keep the developers motivated -- often it is also helpful to look cool for a customer that is a tech wannabe, so he also needs the "cool" stuff.

In terms of methodologies, there is, in fact, one aspect of the agile methodologies (be it scrum, xp or whatever) that should be taken into account. They share the idea that the risk of the project as a whole (in the sense of the actual value added to the customer) is shared between the devel team and the customer. That meaning, if some prioritization is done wrong and the software misses one important feature, it's not the "requirements analisys" fault, but "bad judgment by the customer" -- even if it is something the customer is not experienced enough to know but the devel team is supposed to know.

The good part is that it cuts down most of the coordination cost, the bad part is that if the customer is not fully aware of the risks he is taking, it could lead to very dangerous places.

daniel