This past week of corporate SCRUM training with Bob Schatz took me from just reading about Agile with envy to actually trying out its principles -- albeit with marshmallows, and I'm not referring to his team-building marshmallow-and-spaghetti tower contest (which my team won, I'm proud to say). No, this was a real-world project: my third-grade daughter committed to building a model of the Parthenon out of marshmallows to complete her independent study project. Her teacher was worried for her -- with reason.
What I learned in Agile training was the power of quick iterations, to fail quickly, diagnose why (retrospective), and adjust strategy for the next go (sprint planning). Far more effective than trying to think through all the implications, dependencies, and weaknesses of a theoretical design is to simply build it and test out your concepts (and show it to your customer), while there's still ample time to change. If the pot you're throwing is crooked on the wheel, Agile says to punch it down and begin again, applying what you've learned about centering the clay -- but a waterfall mentality urges you to salvage the crooked pot because you've already invested so much in it, which is the folly I've worked under throughout my professional life.
Here's what happened tonight: We sat down together with our materials and built simple prototypes to test her basic assumptions, such as that marshmallows should stack well (they don't), that linguini should offer enough building stability (not hardly), that sinking the linguini into the project base material will steady the columns (only somewhat), that crossbars of linguini through the marshmallows will stabilize the row of columns (they couldn't), that little marshmallows for the interior columns would be as easy to make as the larger ones (they weren't). That led us to tests with bamboo skewers that promise much better results. Off to the craft store tomorrow, for more materials to test.
So: several 10-minute interations saved us untold panic and despair had we kept planning away and stockpiling materials, expecting it to come together on that final weekend. By letting our iterative tests drive our design direction, we greatly lowered the risk of project failure: early design failures lead to design breakthroughs and success, just as they do in evolutionary systems. So, if you want to promote successful adaptations, best to have the lifecycle of a fruit fly (short iterations).
I'll post photos when her project is done. :-)
Love it! It reminds me of Bob saying he used this method with his family for the remodel of his family room.
Posted by: Busy Traveler | April 22, 2009 at 11:50 AM