Agile History: Prescriptive or Adaptive?

In a recent post David Pereira posed a question about Scrum, but the same question can be asked of other agile methodologies.

“What's going to happen with Scrum? The framework is supposed to help teams uncover the unknown and create value faster, but it became a process to execute the wishes of business people. It descended into something like a Waterscrumfall. Is there a future for that?”

Which focus, uncover the unknown, or execute a standard process, was the thinking behind the Agile Manifesto. To respond to David’s question, I re-read the preface to my first book, “Adaptive Software Development: A collaborative approach to managing complex systems,” published in late 1999. This excerpt indicates the mindset of many Agile Manifesto authors during the formative period of “Agile”.

“George Johnson’s, In the Palaces of Memory, weaves a fascinating story about one of the most complex of all biological phenomena: human memory. From Johnson’s stories of neurobiologists who study the neuron and its components—axons, synapses, dendrites—and try to model how neural cells excite each other to create patterns, to tales of computer scientists whose explorations of the mind use neural networks and artificial intelligence, the reader is drawn to the conclusion that how memory works is still shrouded in mystery and awe.

Software development may be as close to a purely mental activity as any complex business undertaking. Just as with the workings of the mind, we still do not understand the enigma of how software products emerge from the minds of its creators.

Software seems so simple. A few operators, a few operands, and voilà—a program is created. Combinatorial mathematics, however, insures that programs of any length have infinite potential variety—perpetual novelty.

Chess also seems simple. With fewer than two dozen rules governing play, several hundred years have not diminished its capacity to generate perpetual novelty either.

Perpetual novelty is one measure of complexity. However, complex is not the same as chaotic. Chaos is random. Complexity contains patterns, patterns that peek through the perpetual novelty and can be used to thrive in our world. This book is about the complex human endeavor of building computer software. It is about using the emerging field of complexity science, or more specifically the field of Complex Adaptive Systems theory, to aid us in our pursuit of ever more complex software products. At its core, software development is about how we turn memories of our world into computer models.

Neurons are pieces that create the fabric of memory, but how this fabric is woven is unknown. However, not understanding the weaving does not keep us from using the fabric. The infinite fascination of chess arises from simple rules. We cannot predict where a chess game will go, but we can learn patterns of play that bring success. Both chess and memory provide instances of a phenomenon called emergence in the language of Complex Adaptive Systems. Emergence creates results that are greater than the sum of the parts, results that come from exploiting patterns. Harnessing emergence will be a major theme of this book.”

#agile #scrum