In the last few days, Robby Russell of Planet Argon (a Rails
development shop) has been touting his "Dialogue Driven Development"
idea, which appears to partially be a refutation of some Scrum practices.

Background links:

Robby's articles:

http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/08/02/dialogue-driven-development

http://robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/08/03/ddd-is-the-new-conversational-softwa\
re-development

http://robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/08/05/dialogue-driven-development-is-about\
-rounded-corners

The C2 page, mostly empty but interesting in its discouragememt of the
product backlog:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DialogueDrivenDevelopment

Another Planet Argon employee on DDD:
http://blog.brightredglow.com/articles/2006/08/04/its-all-about-the-dialogue

I'm not yet certain what in this idea is fueled by a misconception of
Scrum practices vs. an actual dissatisfaction with Scrum after
experiencing it. There was a choice passage in the third article:

"We find that SCRUM is too process heavy and while we can see it being
a good step away from the Waterfall approach, it's still not giving us
that warm and fuzzy feeling. Rails developers know what that warm and
fuzzy feeling is… and we are hoping to find something that gives our
clients and us the same feeling when we're not coding. We want
lightweight methodologies to complement our lightweight frameworks and
patterns."

And in the first article:

"The problem that we've seen with most examples of using a standard
SCRUM Product Backlog is that it focuses too much on tasks rather than
providing solutions for goals that are central to the success of the
project. It also requires that someone maintain, on a regular basis, a
well-defined list of tasks, which often times the client (Product
Owner) dictates. We've seen many situations where a client has more
feature requests than is necessary in order to attain the goal that
was originally set. If we had a nickel for every time we heard someone
say, "wouldn't it be cool if it did this?""

I'm interested in other Scrum proponents' thoughts on these
statements. My own experience tells me that the product backlogs
mentioned above were cultivated poorly and perhaps confused/conflated
with the sprint backlogs.

While I believe there's room for plenty of Agile methodologies in the
world and wouldn't want to discourage the development of DDD if it
helps them get their software written, I would hate to see Scrum
described inaccurately, especially in a well-oiled meme propagation
machine like the Rails community.

MSM