Keeping it simple.

The light switch should be our inspiration

One of the most important principles in Agile is simplicity.  I work with plenty of clever people which means we come up with plenty of complicated ways of doing things.  True innovation and progress happens when we find simple ways of doing complicated things.  This week we are covering the virtues of simplicity.

When we talk about simplicity, we are not talking about something which is simple.  We are talking about something which is simple to use, simple to work with and simple to understand.  The example I like to use most, is the electrical power grid.  When we need to put a light in a room we plug in a lamp and turn on the switch.  The technology and work that goes into getting electricity to that lamp is very complex to but to us it is simple.

Technology like smart phones, web sites and accounting software should be like the electrical power grid.  Sadly, it is not.  Microsoft technologies are great for PC’s but in order to write web applications for a phone you need Xamarin or understand HTML5 to write Windows 10 applications.  Those applications do not work on Android and iOS devices.  This is just a sample of some of the technologies which do not play nice with each other for either market or technical reasons.

The blame for this trend is very smart people who, instead of working together to create simple and elegant solutions, have split into warring tribes.  It would take an entire book to discuss the history of why this has happened.  So to the average consumer we have a layer of complexity to everything we do and it needs to stop.  Even Apple has made music players a colossal mess making it impossible for people to manage the thousands of songs in their music libraries.

I do not have any magic bullets to fix this but is up to everyone in the agile community to try and reduce this kind of complexity.  It will not be easy but neither was setting up the national power grid.
Until next time.

Dungeons and Dragons Made Me a Better Scrum Master

A teen-aged past time helped
shape my career as a scrum master

As a teen-ager, I stumbled into the world of gaming.  Board games, toy soldiers, and Dungeons and Dragons became a central feature of my young life.  My initial fascination became a lifelong hobby.  Today my house contains thirty years of scale model soldiers, tanks, ballistae and medieval fortifications.  It also occurs to me that my hobby helped shape my career as a scrum master.

Dungeons and Dragons was one of the first commercial role playing games.  It came out in 1974.  I would discover it in the early 1980’s as the hobby caught on nationally.  The game featured all the tropes of swords and sorcery.  To a nerdy kid who was picked last for most games on the playground, it was a chance to be a powerful wizard or hulking warrior.  Dragons, Orcs and goblins would quake in fear at the mention of my name.

Through the hobby, I met plenty of older kids who would become my friends and mentor me through high school.  Saturday nights would be spent over a pizza and brave heroics around White Plume Mountain.  I was exposed to mythology, H.P. Lovecraft, and differences between a gully dwarf and a mountain dwarf.  It was a great way to grow up.

It occurred to me the skills I learned over pizza have been invaluable to me in my later life.  In Dungeons and Dragons, I was a dungeon master and the key to success was organization. I had countless folders of non-player characters, maps and tables covering any possible circumstance.    This organization would help me as a scrum master as I chased down requirements for user stories and test cases.

The improvisational theater aspects of role-playing games make me comfortable leading discussions and retrospectives.  Because of role-playing games, I write better than many of my peers.  This has made me stand out from the other developers and scrum masters as my firm.  Taken together, the ability to be organized, improvise when necessary, and facilitate communications in a group means that a good dungeon master can easily become a good scrum master.

I still spend time painting soldiers and playing board games. I have even written some material for Steve Jackson games.   If I could find the time, I would love to run another game.  Until then, I take comfort my hobby has given me some of the tools to succeed in my career.  

Until next time.