9.08.2003

Where It Came From

Really, I have a lot of ideas; cool things I'd like to do. My friends do too. We come up with interesting ideas all the time. Unfortunately, they either sit untouched forever, or they burst onto the scene with a flurry of energy and light, only to quickly cool into a extraordinarily dense, dark ball of matter. Or more accurately, they just sort of wind off once the basic functionality is up and running.

I can't speak for the other fellas, but I know I just never seem to have enough time. Or, as Kent Beck (Extreme Programming) said, it's not that I don't have enough time. I have too much to do. I have too many things that need done right away and I'm not getting to the things I'd really rather be doing.

Enter Scrum. Scrum is our group's way of elevating the merely fun to the status of "something that needs done, right away." See, by working on these things together as a group, we'll have things like deliverables and deadlines, which (stupid as it sounds) might drive us to spend a little more time working on this cool stuff. And yeah, one of us could blow it off, skip a delivery maybe, but that'd be pretty disappointing. Plus, we might call him names.

I'm not really sure what Scrum means actually. And I'm not going to look it up either, because if I find out it means something different than what I thought, I'm screwed. It's too late to change the name and all that. Plus it sounds cool. So, if I remember correctly, a scrum is a rugby thing where the entire team gathers around the ball, like a huddle, and moves together as a group to push the ball down the field.

Keeping the ball moving towards the goal, together.

And that's really what Scrum is about: moving the ball down the field together. The ball could be the program we deliver, or our growing skills, or maybe even our careers, depending on how you want to look at it. But we're doing it, pushing forward, one step at a time.

posted by risser at 15:40

Nobody has anything to say.