Building systems which work one step at a time.

As a scrum master, I spend much of my time fitting square pegs into round holes.  This includes getting people who won’t speak with each other into the same room to work out issues.  It requires technical people half a world away working together. It is challenging and deeply frustrating.  Confronted with these challenges, why does a scrum master keep going.

One of the greatest articles written about software development is entitled “The Big Ball of Mud.”  It describes how most software come into being during the 1970’s and 19080’s.  It then goes on to illustrate how short term thinking, entropy, and poor software development created the legacy systems which many developers and consultants struggle with today.  These systems are rickety.  Often they are ignored until they are so brittle that they cannot scale or no longer serve the customer needs.  This is the world I live.

It is a world of stand-up meetings with off-shore teams.  Meetings with upper management explaining that Visual Studio 2003 is no way to develop contemporary software.  It is budget meetings where you have to describe continuous integration to an accountant who cannot monetize more responsive systems.  It is the world where I fill out performance appraisal goal sheets in spite of growing evidence that contemporary performance evaluation processes do not work.

As a scrum master, we do it because we want to build systems which work.  We do it because software developers should be making software instead of dealing with corporate politics and bureaucracy.  We do it because public companies need to make the transition to the current century and global economy.  The software is just the first step when we talk about business transformation.  It is why I keep going.

Until next time.