Hi,
Something occurred to me today while trying to do an exercise that I didn’t have time to do and will not have time to do tonight. Those things bother me, but little visual metephors are nice and at least I got one of them.
We have lots of little “exceptions” in the world of language and science. “I after E” is a rule, of course, except after “C” and blah blah “neighbor and weigh”. That is just one. And at one point leopards were jungle creatures until they found one in the snow and said, oh, that’s a “snow leopard”. We adapt as wel go along, more so the further we get from math, which is one gigantic tautology with both sides of the equals sign (or in language, the “is”) are the same exact thing.
SDLC methodologies are not close to math. They involve complex ideas (words, thoughts) that even when defined have a context, an environment, and a value.
Remember years ago I was writing about PMI and phases? Sure you do. Yes you do. Okay, well I did. I made this sassy little picture:
And then I gave a whole bunch of artifacts as examples:
And I was thinking, Sprints are obviously a different animal from the above, but the iteration is common. I get the impulse to say, “well, a spike is not really a backlog item but it kind of is, so let’s call it something special and make an exception.” This is commonplace. I would suggest taking a step back, maybe?
If you took all the stuff that Scrum calls “spikes” and all the stuff that people say don’t really fit in a Sprint such as political or organizational change, fact-finding missions, hardware setup, etc etc, and consider them along with the backlog in a Sprint planning session, then the first model of outputs driving inputs holds. In fact, even without applying it wholistically, inputs in Scrum and Agile still drive outputs and vice versa. It is about responding to change, and responding in general.
Kinda neat at this moment. Maybe not a big deal, but I can see two schools of thought merging here in a really obvious way that never occurred to be as vividly before. It is a bit embarassing, I suppose. Still, I bare my soul to you, Dear Reader. A Sprint need not be limited to tasks or stories. Really, I don’t know if it *ever* is… no matter how cut and dry the backlog seems. There is always churn in the background, and actions have reactions.
Best,
Josh