Can Cricket explain Agile & Scrum?

Published in

Object Edge

5 min readMar 12, 2018

What is Agile? The ability to create and respond to change in order to succeed in an uncertain and turbulent environment.

Scrum is a popular Agile framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Agile and Scrum are not specific to software project or product development. It can be applied to any problem space. It can be leveraged by students, teachers, construction workers and many others.

Dave West, CEO of scrum.org mentioned that there are 12+ Million users of Scrum. Over half billion viewers across the globe watch Cricket every year. This means, we can teach Agile and Scrum to half billion population by showing comparison with Cricket! Not exactly, but you get the point.

Let’s look at South Africa’s epic chase of 438 at Johannesburg in 2006 to understand Scrum.

Herschelle Gibbs, South African batsman, during the match

Herschelle Gibbs Scored 175 (111) to take South Africa past the monumental challenge of 434 runs from Australia. This is the highest target chased successfully by any team in one day international cricket till today. He was declared Man of the Match.

Is individual performance sufficient to take the team to the Victory? On the Australian side Ricky Ponting scored almost equal runs at similar run rate.

So why did South Africa Win? Stronger performance by a Cross Functional Team! (Wicket Keeper, Bowlers, Batsmen, Captain, Coach).

Graeme Smith (Captain) and Mickey Arthur (Coach) kept the team focused and help win the game. Cricket Coach is similar to Scrum Master who doesn’t participate in actual delivery but helps team deliver to greatest potential. Captain, similar to Product Owner participates in the delivery of the goal, guides team during the entire process by prioritizing needs of the situation (requirements).

Former South Africa coach Mickey Arthur (left) with captain Graeme Smith. Photograph: Jon Hrusa/EPA

At one point during Australia Inning, Gibbs, observing the scoreboard with disbelief, walked over to wicketkeeper Mark Boucher and said: “Bouch, they could get 400 here!” to which the latter casually replied: “Try again, Hersch. Do the math. We’re going to do bloody well to keep them to 400.” South Africa had a target of 434 to chase.

That’s Backlog! In the real project, the backlog/target almost always change. That’s true in cricket too. If it rains during the match, Duckworth-Lewis method is used to calculate new target. Scrum allows us to accommodate such changes.

Here is how South Africa chased the target. They scored approximately 8 runs per over (Run Rate). That’s Teams Velocity. Each over can be considered an equivalent of Sprint.

The score card for South Africa team for their inning:

If you notice, every player had different strike rate (SR, runs per ball). Irrespective of that, the team maintained almost constant run rate (Velocity). Further, if you compare the match strike rate to ODI avg for a player (eg: Boeta Dippenaar), you will find differences (Ave). This points out that each member deliver at different capacity in each project/assignment.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance :-)

When you look at the earlier run rate (Velocity) data in cumulative chart, it shows Burndown (Burnup).

Michale Hussey (Australia player) commented — “The scary thing was, the comparisons kept going up on the board, and they [South Africa] were always 15 or 20 runs ahead of us. Batting without any hope of winning was such a dangerous thing. They had complete freedom. I thought, ‘far out, they’re going to win easily’”.

That’s the advantage of checking the burndown. You can figure out if you are on track to deliver the project on time. It is also true for every scrum team that they have nothing to lose when they work with full commitment. In the above graph, you will notice that run rate (Velocity) was different during different parts of the game. Similarly, in Scrum it is possible that the team will start slow during initial sprints and will deliver almost at constant velocity after that. It is possible that the team may take shortcuts against the ‘Definition of Done’ and accumulate tech debt or there is change in direction(alternate technology, new market conditions, etc). Inevitably, the velocity of the team will drop. Nonetheless, by looking at burndown you can catch such slowdown and reset expectations about completion of work.

During the match, often times, the team came together in huddle. This is to decide strategy or review the situation. These ceremonies in Scrum are called Planning and Review.

It’s important you celebrate every milestone. This keeps the team’s morale high as seen in the jubilous mood in the picture below.

It’s always useful to know previous stats but in software projects they are always hard to find for a given team. Each project is unique and so is the team. If you try to keep the team together between projects, you would take out one variable. Also, collect whatever stats you can about the team/members/environment/technology. They can help you compare the team’s performance during the Scrum and help the team during retrospective.

That’s Agile Development and Scrum for you. Or may be you learned Cricket and joined the half billion population.

Do not understand the terminologies used in this article. No worries. You can refer to scrum guide to understand the exact definition of Scrum and related terms. Also refer to Agile Manifesto and principles behind Agile Manifesto.

References:

Can Cricket explain Agile & Scrum?

Written by Kiran Gawde