You might be a HyperScrumDamentalist if …

tl;dr: A little hump day humor at the expense of cargo-cult agileistas everywhere.

User Story

As a product manager, I want to avoid prescriptive approaches to Agile.

Description

This past April at the TriAgile conference in Raleigh, I had the pleasure of listening to David Hussman give warning to the perils that await those who insist on practicing a prescriptive approach to Agile.

Later the same day, I sat at the same table for lunch as Mr. Hussman, myself making cracks about zealots who view Agile more as a formulaic set of pre-defined patterns than an intrinsic value system.

During the drive home I was struck with a possibly more memorable — and hopefully more entertaining — way of presenting some of the same points.

I tweeted out a series of these this past May.

UATs

So with apologies Jeff Foxworthy for a shameless rip-off of his ‘You Might be a Redneck’ schtick, I offer up the following as possible touch-point tests to determine …

… you might be a HyperScrumDamentalist if …

1. You believe the singular act of holding morning-stand-ups makes you Agile.
2. You find yourself obsessively straightening the PostIt notes on your Kanban board.
3. You catch yourself rejecting tickets solely on the basis formatting and/or grammar.
4. You hear yourself arguing process with an appeal to authority such as “… but Bob Galen says …”
5. You spot in your backlog a story titled ‘Install Usability.’
6. You relegate the role of product manager to simply that of a JIRA-Slinging Ticket-Monkey.
7. You believe that SAFe® is the infallible word of Scrum.
8. You hear yourself name-dropping ‘The Scrum Guide’ as one might cast a spell or invoke a magic incantation.
9. You find yourself in HR after freaking out because you ran out of powder pink PostIt notes exclusively used to denote DevOps tasks.
10. You catch yourself prescribing individual team member positions for stand-ups using blue tape markers on the floor, each bearing a specific team member name — in which case — you are most certainly a Cargo-Cult HyperScrumDamentalist!

Discussion

Ok, first a disclaimer. The above opinions are mine and mine alone … and published back on September 2, 2015.

Moreover, I’m currently and awesomely blessed to be working with a very effective and highly functional scrum team. Perhaps that’s why I can sit back and laugh at smart-aleck remarks that might make other product managers consider a career switch to that of a lion tamer and/or Wal-Mart greeter.

That said, please feel free to contribute to the above list, either with improving any of my points … or by offering insights of your own.