I am immensely grateful to Craig Larman that run the Certified Scrum Master Class that I attended: it was 3 days long, it was deep, and the message was “this is just the starting point”. He showed something like a 70 titles book list, that was more or less required to become good scrum masters. Scary but true.

Unfortunately, when it comes to mass trainings, many people on the learning side just want some rules to follow, and keep acting like they are on the novice stage of the Dreyfus model. I guess this is both the effect of people “sent” to trainings instead of genuinely curious trainee, and also of the number of teachers who are not at the same level of the original trainers, some of them are probably not delivering the whole message.

On the other hand, this happened in even worst fashion with different methodologies (RUP ended up being dogma-driven in much shorter time just to mane one) so one might argue that despite the traditional decay curve of any methodology, agile is still doing remarkably well.

the ‘certified’ courses though are very nice training sessions to learn more about the framework and to have learn some best practices from the coach itself. I myself had the pleasure of being in a session with Lyssa Adkins who wrote a book about coaching agile teams. So there was nothing wrong with but indeed it’s nothing more than a mere training sessions.

On the other hand I truely think there is a great danger in those certificates. And it’s parallel with what Sander calls Scrumdamentalism in general.

I like to call it ‘Wikipedia – Knowledge’, some manager hears a talk about agile and thinks his whole organisation can ‘improve’ by using agile and more in general scrum.

So the manager does a wiki search on ‘agile’ and ‘scrum’ and reads those wonderful two pages and immediately delegates to his employees to start using scrum and make a backlog first you guys…..

Don’t get me wrong on this matter, it’s nice to see there are still getting more people acquainted with agile…. But… and that’s where the problems arise for me. Enthusiams is great but what does filling a product backlog really mean. Much more than writing user stories according to a predefined format. The small sentence that is a user story is not enough to understand where the product is really going to, what is the complete context regarding the product you want to build or are building.

That’s why after following the certified scrummaster course , I’ve started reading books like ‘Pragmatisch Modelleren met UML 2.0′ , ‘Writing effective use cases’, ‘user stories applied’ and much more…. Those are all about creating a clear set of business functionality in the most sensible way possible and useable in an agile environment.

It’s not only the ‘analysis’ part that has much more to do to it than just writing a small user story… think about the planning and the complexity of those stories……

But i’m not going to write ten pages long about all that.

I want to conclude with a piece of advice on that matter. If you are in a management like position and you think your organisation will benefit from using agile, think about it more than once , hire a senior consultant / change agent which has the right credentials, experience and expertise in the agile field and then get started.Instead of sending an employee to a 2 day certification course and hope he or she will be able to make your whole organisation more agile….

So Sander, i’m guessing you’re completely spot on with your blog post. Looking forward to read your next book! Tell us when it will be available

I sincerely think you’re right on this matter.

The Certified Courses though are quite nice to learn about the agile ‘framework’. But it’s nothing more than just a training indeed. Instead of Scrumdamentalism I like to call it ‘Wikipedia Management’. Just fill in one simple google search criteria and open up the wiki. 2 days later someone , somewhere in an organisation, has to build some kind of ‘Product Backlog’ and the only thing that person knows is the fact it has a certain predefined format…. That’s quite tricky indeed because such a small sentence called a User Story often does not mention enough functional/product context. What does ‘as an bookkeeper I want to make an invoice’ really really mean. Is it a use case or isn’t it ? That’s why some 5 years ago I started reading books, followed lots of courses, like the one you wrote on UML , some stuff from A. Cockburn about writing effective use cases where there is also a whole chapter on context. Several years later i’m still trying to fine tune my way of analysing although using SMART use cases is a solid approach which has never let me down so far.

In my opinion it’s more than necessary that agile enthusiast take a closer look at the complete story of software development. For organisations who want to think about changing their current way of working to a more agile way of doing things, I have one piece of advice. Get yourselves a solid and experienced consultant / change agent who knows the pitfalls instead of abusing a certified scrummaster in your company to widely push agile all over the organisation.

Because believe me fellow readers of this blog…. It’s not so easy peasy at all

Really looking forward to your new book Sander…. Let me know when it’s available.

However, in the past, before Agile, people were hiding the fact that they weren’t that good, by shouting a lot and having a lot of meetings. This flufiness feels a bit like it. As long as you present cool new gimmick-like words, you’re a guru in the field and get invited back to conferences. While in the end, you really don’t know all that much, or at least don’t present anything new. Not even good solutions to problems people are having with Agile.

The feature injection quote is a good one. No idea what was said there.