Things have been moving for our little group.

Agile France

First and foremost, the group is renaming itself. It will thereafter be known as Agile France.

The extended French-speaking sphere

Second, its bylaws changed to reflect that the group is willing to help anyone in the extended French-speaking sphere (ie. French-speaking countries, non-French groups in countries where French is spoken, and French-speaking groups in countries where French is not an official language).

6-member strong board

Thirdly, a stronger team of people has been elected members of the board. We are jumping from 3 (Laurent Bossavit, Gabriel Le Van, Patrice Petit) to 6 (Raphaël Pierquin, Bernard Notarianni, Sandrine Olivencia, Antoine Contal, Laurent Bossavit). This boardis elected for 2 years.

What to think of all this?

• in my view, the name change is excellent. I do believe that it will give more credibility to the organization. I remember talking to someone who thinks that the French Scrum User Group had been created in part because they felt that Scrum was not well represented by XP France — he repeated that this was clear to him, considering the name. I do not believe XP France is neglecting Scrum, but it is just as well that the name makes it clear.
• specifiying that the association is willing to help the whole “extended French-speaking sphere” proved to be controversial. I personnally do not care much, but many thought that we can get into conflicts with other groups, such as Agile Québec. I’d personnally be very surprised if that becomes a problem.
• though I agree that the new team looks strong and motivated, I am disappointed by the slightly heavy handed manner. We were basically told “oh, we are also going to change the board and, by the way, there is the only team you can get to vote for”. A simple email to the mailing list would have helped make things easier. I think. Also, a few people seemed to be disappointed, as they would have been candidates, given the chance.
• I am also disappointed by the rather long mandate (2 years, down from 3 years in the original proposal). One argument was that 1 year is not enough to let the board members settle, and they would then be judged unfairly for their first year. Well, who’s saying that the members of the association would be so harsh as to kick them out if they can explain why they haven’t achieved much? Surely, a reasonable explanation is not too much to ask.

Anyway, at least it seems that the association is doing its best to be as relevant as possible. I think those changes are for the better.

See you next year and all the best to the new board! There is certainly work to do  for everyone.

• Check out my pictures from the meeting

I thought I would give more details here.

Our goals

We didn’t exactly manipulate the participants, but we certainly did not reveal, on purpose, what our goals were:

• help dissenting voices come out of the closet — very few people are vocally criticizing Scrum today in France, and I have found no blogs. I wanted to show the pro-Scrum side that they do not have the final word.
• let people vent — both pros and antis
• make participants think — one later came to me and suggested that I should have offered “alternative solutions”. Well, I have none (though I do have some starting points, see below)

Alternative endings

We had prepare additional materials, in case the discussion died out. Fortunately, it was so lively that we couldnt use them at all. You’ll find all three of them below.

You are not alone

The first thing I wanted to highlight is that, though dissenting voices on Scrum (or Agile) are not currently heard in France, they do exist in the rest of the world:

• James Shore has blogged that “when people say “Agile,” they usually mean Scrum” and that “it’s very easy for teams using Scrum to throw out design“. Finally, he points out that the “Scrum makes it worse by ignoring important (but hard) agile engineering practices, and the Scrum Alliance makes it worse still with their armies of trainers [...] issuing dubious “ScrumMaster” certificates to people“. There is more in today’s article on InfoQ.
• David Anderson lobbyied hard for an ‘Agile Fringe’ stage at Agile 2009 Conference, feeling that the vocal agile community is too mainstream. I agree with him, and I feel that the Agile 2009 program could have given more room to dissenting voices. The Agile Frontier stage is not bad, but it should have gone further.
• Naresh Jain says that Agile (as practices today) is the new waterfall.
• which reminds us directly of Steve Freeman‘s aphorism, uttered during CITCON Amsterdam: “Scrum is the new RUP”
• some people did manage to get controversial sessions accepted to Agile 2009. Not all are directly related to Scrum:
  • JB Rainsberger: Integration Tests are a scam
  • Bas Vodde & Steven Mak: Let’s Stop Calling It Agile
  • Paul Hodgetts: ScrumMasters considered harmful – Where did it go wrong?
  • Brian Foote & Joseph Yoder: Big Balls of Mud: Is this the best Agile can do?
  • also, there might be good content at Linda Rising’s Agile: placebo or real solution?
• last but not least, Alistair Cockburn, author of the Crystal family of methodologies, signatory of the Agile Manifesto and Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, will host a keynote at Agile 2009 entitled “I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It”

Scrum has Crossed The Chasm

There is a model that give hints to the current situation with Scrum. It is the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle, as amended by Geoffrey Moore in his seminal book “Crossing The Chasm“.

In short, it appears that many of the arguments against Scrum do not just mean that it is poorly explained, nor just that it is poorly understood, but rather that it is now being adopted by a large number of people. Or, to rephrase this, that it has been (consciously or not) packaged in order to be palatable to the mainstream. This implies trainings, books, consulting services, explanations, case studies, success stories. In short, packaging the approach just like a marketing team would do. That the people behind Scrum did it on purpose (as I believe) is beyond the point: the Agile approach that wins the hearts and minds of IT professionals everywhere is necessarily the one that comes with such as package, a whole product, in the words of Moore.

That is a reality that people that are blindly against Scrum must acknowledge.

ARXTA

Finally, I would like to point any aspiring Scrum-evil-ist to Brian Marick‘s writing on Agile roots. His argument is that “Agile” (and, I guess, the names of pretty much all Agile methodologies) is too easy a term to adopt. In other words, many people will look at the name, glance at the practices, and quickly come to the conclusion that “hey, this is exactly what we’ve been doing all along! Let’s avoid asking ourselves hard questions and let’s not change the way we work.” Which is, obviously, missing the whole point.

Brian has came up with a new name for the roots of Agile: “Artisanal Retro-Futurism, crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism.” The name is cryptic (and even slightly repulsing) on purpose, so that people will have to ask, and will have to have a conversation.

Further reading

Check out

• my photos of the notes taken on easel pads
• the transcript (in French) of the session by Nicolas Martignole (Google translation in English); he even has a recording somewhere on his site
• my notes from the session at CITCON Amsterdam 2008
• “Is Scrum Evil?” a question asked by Jeffrey on Stackoverflow

Coming up is XP Day Paris, May 25th & 26th (next week!). No less than 3 sessions will be presented by yours truly:

• Introduction to Retrospectives, with Laurent Bossavit
• TDD Explained to Managers, with Stephane Labati, a former colleague from Valtech
• Is Scrum Evil? a workshop with Guillaume Tardif — the session I’m most excited about!

I will be at the dinner on Monday evening as well; feel free to come and talk.

In August, I will be at Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago. This time, I will host a Coding Dojo on Legacy Code, with my partner in crime Guillaume.

Unfortunately, Is Scrum Evil?, a session I had proposed with Jeffrey Fredrick, has not been accepted. Fear not! We will be back with a revenge during the Open Jam part of the conference. I have hope many big names of the Agile world will join us. Promising session, trust me.

Next, September 18th will see CITCON Paris. This conference is dear to me — I have participated to all previous European CITCON events, and I am sure this will be one to remember. 3 months to go and the list of registrants is already closed!

As you may know, this is an Open Space event, so sessions are not known in advance and will be discovered during the opening session. Sounds scary? Wait until you suggest a session! ;-)

Other events of note this year will surely be Valtech Days 2009 and Devoxx. I have helped organize Valtech Days in 2007 and 2008; having left the company, it will not be the case this year, but, who knowns? I might still get to host a session.

As for Devoxx, I have never participated so far, but I heard so many good things that I really want to make the trip this year. We’ll see.

Well, this will be a busy year. Hopefully, I will have a few vacation days for non-techie stuff as well!