Rituals of Hypocritical Scrum

The Certified Scrum Master training does not make anyone a great Scrum Master. News at 11. But one thing I think it makes is better agile team members. I like to suggest CSM training to each team member I work with. The two days of Scrum training usually do not give much new about the roles, artifacts or ceremonies of Scrum to the attendees. But it still makes a difference.

As it says in Scrum Alliance introduction to Scrum "The Scrum framework is deceptively simple." In fact it is quite possible to start up doing a sort of hypocritical Scrum with all the ceremonies in place: plannings, dailies, sprint reviews and perhaps even retrospects. And fail. With hypocritical I mean Scrum without touching the core of Scrum - its principles. The ceremonies of Scrum become mere empty rituals without some understanding of the principles below them.

The principles of Scrum are in Agile Manifesto and in Toyota Product Development System. On a higher level it is in embracing change and concentrating on producing value. On method level it is in using pull systems and JIT, removing waste and doing continuous improvement of the system. 

Someone just tweeted that when you write code you should know at least one level of abstraction below the level at which you operate. For instance when writing C it's good to understand about the call stack and dynamic and static linking to libraries and optimizations at compile time. The same goes with Scrum. It is not enough to know the secret handshake. You must understand the things that can make your process work. And the same goes with Kanban, XP or other agile process models.

The CSM training does not teach you all the principles of Scrum. But it does one thing that is very important. It demonstrates some of those principles at work with some very simple exercises and thus usually gives a some kind of incurable agile brain tumor to most of the participants.

I find myself often in the empty rituals mode. I envy my colleagues like Kaira who seems to be able to work on the principles level all the time in his daily work. I just have to train my nose to smell my own odors to keep up.