Actually, I’ll neither apologize nor justify; Instead, I’ll fret then ignore.

Scrum is a really simple thing with lots of missing parts that best practices, including those from XP fill in. The fill in, though, is at the call of the self-managing organization, nor as stated by experts. This was why, at first glance, I was excited about RUP – I thought it was a hypertext repository of best practices.

The work of implementing Scrum is to upgrade professional and engineering practices to build high quality software. And, to change the customer/product manager relationship so they know how to own the project. And, to change the enterprise so that it optimizes rather than degrades productivity and return on investment. Quite a big challenge.

As I see methodologist flock to restate Scrum in their own terms, I know that they have missed the point. Rather than focusing outwards at the problems of being a better profession and helping our customers get more, better, quicker … they are focused on perfecting a methodology. This is Frederick Taylor, expert definition of the process. This misses the whole point of Agile and Scrum, that top-down expert driven processes aren’t as “Agile” as empirical, inspect and adapt, lean processes.

I knew that we’d have this problem as methodologists studies on how to remain relevant. I will do what I can to minimize the damage, however. I remember XP smells; an Agile and Scrum smell is when a for-profit corporation backs initiatives to build methodologies.

Scrum is a movement, not an organization. I recommend that those who want to build methodologies leave Scrum alone to those of us with a different mission and understanding. No more “plug-in’s.” If you want to build a methodology, do it from scratch or other best practices, rather than parsing, restating, and re-interpreting something that stands on its own and doesn’t need any more help.

In the early 1990’s, my company developed and provided to IBM, Coopers&Lybrand, and numerous individual companies a process automation software package, MATE, that automated methodologies and made them functional to developers, project managers, and process experts. You could even have called MATE a framework. My hope was that this would make methodologies easier to use. I was at a training class for a company that was going to use Summit-D on MATE, and overheard one lead developer say, “Gee, we have to do this, also, in addition to building software!”  Instead of building something that helped methodologies, I facilitated what one person called, a pig on rollerskates. Still a pig, just faster. I suggest that the frameworks that are coming out are along the same lines. The only exception that I’ve seen to date was Conchango’s use of VSTS, which was exceptionally well crafted as “guidance.”

So, leave us alone.

Ken