On Aug 6, 2006, at 5:40 PM, mmanley_ygroups wrote:
> 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.
I've started to comment on his blog a few times, but haven't had the
time to devote to a answer him fully, and decided a half-ass reply
would do more harm than good. But half-ass replies here should be
OK, right? :)
> 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:
I think the first answer is, "These guys have never done Scrum
well." You are right that they describe a Product Backlog that is
way too fine grained, and may be confused with the Sprint Backlog.

That being said...as someone who has gotten 100% into Rails
development, I find myself using Scrum less. At least, on the
surface, official Scrum. Rails makes me^W^W^Wlets me be so
productive that we are basically having 1 day sprints. We have a
constantly updated backlog, we have a daily conversation with the
team and the customer, simultaneously, and we cover what we've done
and what we're going to do, and then we do it. Like a daily Scrum
and Sprint Planning all in one. We're still doing a "Review" every
two weeks with the CEO/CTO to catch them up on what all we've done.

I believe, having done Scrum well, and having done the "Rails
experience," that what Robby and .... the other guy .... are
describing with "Dialogue Driven Development" is exactly what happens
when you start with Scrum or something Scrummy, add a hyper-
productive programming language and framework, mixin a very active
and interactive customer, and then just start running at a
comfortable pace and see when you get somewhere cool.


I guess I should just copy-paste this onto Robby's blog now, huh?

- Michael