Waterfall and Scrum as a relay race
Both waterfall and agile delivery are sometimes described as a relay race.
When applied to waterfall the baton represents the critical path and imbues upon its holder the status of Most Valuable Player. That person carries the weight of delivery as they race to pass the baton to the next person whether it’s a developer or a tester.
In a relay race, after a team member passes the baton they stop, get off the track, and rest.
Similiarly in waterfall, once the— I’m kidding. Of course they don’t rest because there’s a new race to start. So they make their way to the adjacent track and start running again … and hoping the person they need to pass the baton to is there in time to receive it.
And then they move to the next race:
You can see how the relay race metaphor starts to fall apart here because who is everyone handing their baton to if their teammates are busy with on other racetracks with other projects?
It’s the three-dimensional Tic Tac Toe of sports. No wonder it requires such intensive project management with complicated Gantt charts and tight coordination of people, dependencies, and deadlines.
Placing your baton on the ground and hoping someone comes along to pick it up soon does feel more like the handovers we see in waterfall delivery. Who put this here? Can I talk to them? They put it in the wrong spot. Can I run with it now? Is someone else meant to pick it up?
I’ve also seen Scrum compared to a relay race as a way of criticising it as compressed waterfall but instead of running 100 metres before passing to a teammate it’s closer to 5 metres which backfires on critics of Scrum because when you shrink that distance you completely change the dynamic. You know what it looks more like?
Coincidentally, Jeff Sutherland also uses a photo of the New Zealand All Blacks on the cover of his 2021 publication The Scrum Papers in which he says:
[Scrum] was strongly influenced by a 1986 Harvard Business Review article on the practices associated with successful product development groups; in this paper the terms “Rugby” and “Scrum” were introduced, which later morphed into “Scrum” in Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions (1991, DeGrace and Stahl) relating successful development to the game of Rugby in which a self-organizing team moves together down the field of product development.
In Scrum we talk about the whole team delivering but when you look closely you may still be able to identify that, at any one time, only one person is holding the ball. The difference is that the whole team is playing the same game and aligned to the same objective regardless of their role in the team. Everyone is watching the ball, everyone is supporting whoever is holding the ball, and everyone is ready to receive the ball at a moment’s notice.
My views are my own and do not represent the Department of Health and Aged Care, the Australian Public Service, or the Australian Government.
