Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Pick Your Methodology Like How You Do the Laundry On the Yahoo Scrum email list there was an interesting discussion on how Scrum and XP should be combined. There's a lot of synergy between the two agile methodologies. I advocate using Scrum for the project methodology while adopting many of the XP programming practices for the development team. Many people seem to agree. But how do you do that? One person said you should adopt XP and Scrum separately, then combine them. Experience each on their own so you'll know best best how to combine them. I didn't think much about the suggestion and at first I thought this was a sensible approach. Then there was some discussion about if it was really necessary to practice them separately first? Then the analogy was used to say you don't use more than one detergent in your laundry at the same time, do you? So don't mix your methodologies either. And again, without thinking much about it, I thought yes, using more than two soaps in a load of laundry would be silly. So far it doesn't sound like I do much thinking...and sometimes that's true, but on more reflection I realized I do use more than one soap when I do the laundry. In fact, I use a whole bunch of products in the laundry depending on the effect I want to get. I realized I do the same with methodologies as well. Sorting: Laundry Metaphor Number One Sorting is the most critical part of doing laundry. If you don't properly sort then your whites get dingy, colors fade, stains get set, fabrics fray, and bulky items don't get clean. By the magik of metaphorical extension I'll say sorting is also the most important step for selecting methodologies. Different projects are different. They have different people, different political environment, different customers, different funding, different goals, and so on. Applying the same approach to every project shouldn't work. Use each project as a chance to take a fresh look and sort things out. Use Products for Effect: Laundry Metaphor Number Two When doing a load of laundry I will use far more than two soaps. For a load of whites, for example, I will use: 1. tide 2. fabric softener 3. bleach 4. oxyclean Then in the dryer I'll use a fabric softener sheet. That's five, count them five different products in one load of laundry. Is that going overboard? You may think so, but my customer (my wife) doesn't think so! And that's what matters. Every product has its purpose in that it produces a desired outcome. So I don't really care about purity. I don't care that I should only be using one soap or at most two. I'll do what it takes to get the outcome I want. I think that holds for methodologies too. comment[] 4:12:14 PM

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