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Some Day Kanban Will Fail 75% of the Time

Yesterday I had a bit of an argument on Twitter about differences between Scrum and Kanban. Personally I don't care which is better than the other, because I believe that all models are wrong, but some are useful. And both Scrum and Kanban can be useful, given a certain context.

In yesterday's keynote speech at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando Jeff Sutherland said he had seen teams that were "doing Scrum" while they didn't even have a backlog. And there are reports of "Scrum teams" not practicing daily standup meetings, and teams not delivering a new product release every week.

These are not Scrum teams. They are ScrumBut teams. They do Scrum, *but* without some of the key ingredients.

Unfortunately, some people arguing against Scrum include these ScrumBut teams in their evaluations of the "high failure rate" of Scrum. They love quoting that "at least 75 percent of Scrum implementations fail." And I think "Yes of course, 75% fails when that includes the teams that don't understand what they're doing."

I believe that right now Kanban doesn't suffer from this problem. Kanban doesn't have a high failure rate because Kanban is still at the start of its adoption curve. Only very smart people like David Anderson and Karl Scotland are practicing it. And they know how to do it right!

But just wait a few years and see. When idiots like me get their hands on Kanban, we will start implementing KanbanButs, but we'll be calling it Kanban. We will have absolutely no idea what we're doing, because value stream mapping is not as simple as story point estimation. And we will introduce "Kanban teams" without limited WIP, or "Kanban teams" without a vizualized workflow.

Then the world will see a 75% failure rate of "Kanban" implementations.

And then there will be a great new software development method called Bonkiborki (which is the Mongolean word for 42). And I will have invented it. And it will have a much higher success rate than Scrum and Kanban, because I will be the only one who knows how to do it right.

(image by Misserion)

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Merry Christmas!

I was in a creative mood yesterday.

Merry Christmas! And I wish you much happiness and success in the New Year.

Top 25 Hitler Rants

I once learned that, when something annoys you, you should immerse yourself into it completely. After that it won't bother you anymore.

For example: if you can't get a stupid song out of your head, then sing it out loud for at least an hour. That will help to wash and flush your brain.

I'm experiencing the same thing with The Downfall of Agile Hitler video. Over the last few weeks, the links and tweets about this video just kept coming and coming, from all over the world, day after day. It was annoying me immensely. And seeing that this is just one of many Hitler spoofs out there on YouTube, I decided to step in and create this list of Hitler videos.

Top 25 Hitler Rants

#	Video	Ratings	Views
1	Hitler gets banned from World of Warcraft	17541	3048787
2	Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live	11957	1636989
3	Hitler's got the wrong bike	1246	733719
4	Hitler learns of the Dragonball Live action movie	2707	281779
5	Hitler learns he lost to Clemson	332	217283
6	Hitler learns the Giants beat the Cowboys	242	128032
7	Hitler gets banned from Wikipedia	356	104315
8	Hitler learns his team is not agile (!!!)	229	60141
9	Hitler learns Arsenal lost to Tottenham	137	55316
10	Hitler orders a pizza	259	53357
11	Hitler is upset after the Detroit Lions finish 0-16	134	45692
12	Hitler hates Pacquiao	149	30588
13	Hitler - Internet Censorship Australia	306	26042
14	Hitler orders DMCA down	107	23642
15	Hitler's nightly build fails (!!!)	40	20375
16	Hitler gets pissed at YouTube	480	18808
17	Hitler and the Tony Awards	47	18178
18	Hitler enjoys Mexican food	84	14322
19	Hitler reacts to new Star Trek movie	146	11446
20	Hitler doesn't like the new Team Fortress 2 update	259	8472
21	Hitler rants about Pelosi and the CIA	67	8149
22	Hitler learns Bristol City lost to Hull City	36	7286
23	Hitler wants to eat at Heartland Grill	14	5762
24	Hitler learns Manchester United lost to Barcelona	19	3575
25	Hitler gets banned from Prison Planet forum	77	3301

Note: there are even more variations of this Hitler video on YouTube. But this should be enough to give me some peace of mind...

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Social Media Experts Are Poets, Software Developers Are Novelists

While checking out hundreds of social media blogs it surprised me to see how many "social media experts" there are. The number of people blogging about social media seems to be easily twice that of the number of people blogging about software development. It's because social media experts are like poets, and software developers are like novelists.

Allow me to explain.

I was once told that at least 10% of the people in my country busy themselves with writing. That's 1.6 million writers among 16 million people! This number shocked me, as I was intending to write a novel at the time, and the idea of having to compete with so many people was daunting. Fortunately, I then learned that most of those people are writing diaries, poetry, and self-biographies. (And blogs about diaries, poetry and self-biographies.) Only very few are actually trying to write something interesting. Like science fiction novels.

Poetry and novels, like social media and software development, find themselves at opposite corners in my barrier-of-entry-vs-quality-perception diagram:

The horizontal axis of this diagram shows you the barrier to entry of a certain profession. This barrier to entry refers to the hindrances that someone will face when trying to adopt a profession. These hindrances could be education, licensing, guilds, control of resources, quota limits, government regulations, craftsmanship, etc. The barrier to entry for novelists is much higher than it is for poets, because writing a novel requires a huge amount of time and energy, while writing a poem doesn't.

Here's my proof:

The earth, the stars, the sun, the moon,

This poem's end comes much to soon.

There, I'm done. I just wrote a poem. (You can expect my novel in about ten years...)

The vertical axis of the diagram shows you what I'd like to call the quality perception of consumers. This refers to how easy it is for consumers to distinguish between high quality and low quality products. The quality perception for novels is much higher than it is for poems. Even for amateur readers it is easier to distinguish between fine novels and badly written novels, than it is to distinguish between good poems and bad poems. (Note: my poem is a good one.)

Another example: Have you noticed that, with the exception of infants, rodents and blind people, the whole world has picked up the hobby of digital photography?

I remember my mother developing photographs in her own darkroom in the attic. I knew nobody else doing things like that 30 years ago. But these days everyone, including my mother, is walking around with a digital camera. And nature lovers even feel the need to publish rules of conduct telling those 6 billion digital photographers how to behave and how to treat nature. (It has been reported that people are freezing butterflies to make their pictures look better.) In the age of digital cameras the barrier to entry to photography has completely vanished.

Likewise, quality perception in photography has dropped tremendously. Thirty years ago it was easy to tell good pictures from bad ones. Now it's different. Yesterday one of my friends told me he had taken 3,000 digital pictures while on vacation in Italy. He will probably delete the 2,800 pictures that look like barf on a tree stump. The remaining pictures will look quite decent, maybe even pretty after some tweaking and tuning in PhotoShop, and the average viewer won't be able to see the difference between such amateur pictures and professional ones. Only professional photographers can see that.

It's the same with modern art...

I was in Tate Modern in London a few weeks ago. One of the pieces of "art" was a big rope lying on the floor. I'm not kidding. A rope lying on the floor... My first thought was that the real art piece was stolen and the thief had thrown away the cord. But apparently, the piece of cord was the art. Both the barrier to entry and the quality perception of art have dropped so low that I wonder when Tate Modern is going to exhibit the works of art that I create in my restroom every morning.

And thus we come to social media...

Social media is like poetry, and digital photography, and modern art. Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account can call himself a social media expert. The barrier to entry is virtually non-existent. And quality perception is on the low side too. How can we tell good experts from bad experts? I wouldn't know. Hell, you could call me an expert! I gave you some tips on how not to waste time with Twitter, didn't I?

It's very different for software developers. Programmers are like novelists, movie directors, and traditional painters. The barrier to entry is high because the work is hard, complicated, and requires craftsmanship. Nobody among my friends is silly enough to "give programming a try". It's much easier for them to take pictures, write poems, or to empty a trash bin on the floor and call it modern art. And the quality perception of software products among consumers is high as well. Just an hour ago my non-geek boyfriend was complaining that most software sucks. And he's right! There are only few high quality software products, and they shine like rubies on a salt flat.

That's why social media experts are like poets, and software developers are like novelists.

Note that I don't claim there's anything wrong with either profession. It's just the way the world is.

(picture by Emborg)

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Top Five Reasons Why Prince2 Sucks

Last week it happened again: one of our employees asked me to pay for Prince2 certification courses for our project managers. (I might have to explain this for my non-European readers. Prince2 is a general-purpose project management methodology. It is promoted by the UK's Office of Government Commerce and over the last 10 years it has spread like a plague among IT companies on the European continent.) It was the third time an employee asked me this question, and my answer was the same as always.

"No".

Our company will not pay for Prince2 certification of our employees. Since this is the third time I was asked the same question, I've decided to make a list of my motivations. Next time I can simply point to this article.

1. The name Prince2 stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments. The name itself already defies its applicability for almost any project, because there is no such thing as a controlled environment. We cannot control the business environments our customers and users exist in, and we cannot control the social environments the project stakeholders operate under. Only state prisons are (more or less) controlled. And it's no coincidence that, when Prince2 is applied faithfully and rigorously, employees are reported to feel imprisoned in their processes (many of them having a tendency to lose the will to live).
2. The Prince2 method --consisting of 8 components, 10 roles, 8 processes, 45 subprocesses and 33 types of artifacts -- is so heavy that it generates its own gravitational field. It is like a black hole that sucks up all your energy, and nothing ever comes out of it.
3. Prince2 does not address Requirements Management or Requirements Development. It does not address the way the Technical Solution should be built nor does it have processes for Verification or Validation of a product. It doesn't deal with progress measurements, the post-deployment phase, project portfolios, or the scaling of project size. The only thing it does well is to turn a project manager's job into the equivalent of a controller of a nuclear powerplant. He has to monitor everything continuously, or something might blow up.
4. Prince2 manages change as something that must be "controlled", not "embraced", as is the preferred approach in agile software projects. All work is managed through Gantt-charts and other top-down management techniques. Self-organization of software developers and other types of knowledge workers, who are (usually) able to think for themselves and to figure out stuff together, is not actively encouraged, and definately not central to its core principles.
5. There is so much overhead involved in running a Prince2 project, with so many documents to be produced, that aborting all Prince2 projects worldwide might have a significant impact on the projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Figure: Prince2 in a nutshell

Over the centuries many great stuff has crossed The English Channel from the British isles to the European mainland. Stuff like The Beatles, Earl Grey tea, Absolutely Fabulous and Discworld. But the Prince2 method might be the first good reason for IT companies in Europe to cut away the sea floor cables and flood the Channel Tunnel.

Thank You, Stupid Americans

This is a copy of my earlier post I wrote for Max Pool at Codesqueeze.com. I'm including it here for completeness. It turned out that Max got 15 people complaining about this post being offensive, while at the same time it got me 50 new subscribers to my feed. It was a nice deal, if you ask me. If you still have some new complaints, please post them over at Codesqueeze. :)

Thank You, Stupid Americans

Did you know that only two countries, the United States and Canada, participate in what the Americans call the "World Series"? It's as stupid as it is hilareous. And it's almost as funny as Max having been bitten yesterday for also being a stupid American. With his coded enumeration of American states he once again showed the world that the typical American blind spot covers just about the entire globe, apparently with the exception of Canada (and possibly Iraq). The average American doesn't know that the European Union has almost twice as many citizens as the United States. Americans only care about their own 50 states. And that's fine with me. As a Dutch guy, when filling out (American-made) personalization forms on (international) web sites, I always chuckle when I see that half a million people in the state of Wyoming are apparently more interesting than the 86 million people in the Chinese province of Shandong.

Last year, when some guy in California noticed that I am from The Netherlands, he asked me if I knew a certain Johan Christiansen in Denmark. (For American readers I should explain why I thought this was funny: There is country, called Germany, with 80 million people in it, separating The Netherlands from Denmark. The chance of me knowing someone in Denmark is as small as the chance of Max being able to pronounce "een schip in Scheveningen" in Dutch.) So I said no, and I asked this guy if he knew a certain Carlos Gonzalez in Ecuador. For some reason he didn't appreciate that reply.

Max asked me today what I think about Americans forcing programming languages, with English syntax, and frameworks with English API's, upon non-English developers in the rest of the world. Well, here's what I think:

Americans are stupid, and I love them for it. Because stupidity leads to simplicity, and simplicity is exactly what we need in software development.

We Europeans are different. We know where the United States are. (It's that place where all that CO2 stuff is coming from.) And we distinguish ourselves from the Americans by making things as complicated as possible, particularly when the French are involved. If the .NET Framework was created by a European organization, it would have a core API in three languages (English, French and German), and there would be many dozens of adapter layers translating these core API's to secondary API's in any of the other twenty official languages. Europeans have a horrible tendency to compromize, not wanting to forget or offend anyone, which makes the outcome of our efforts completely incomprehensible, and utterly unworkable. (My partner works for the European Union, so I know first-hand how things are handled here.)

I think most software developers are now glad that the unique combination of American imperialism and stupidity has resulted in all computer languages and frameworks being presented in one simple language: English.

Microsoft has once made the error of trying to please the non-English users of Excel by offering versions of Visual Basic for Appliation (VBA) in non-English variants. I have to tell you, programming in that language, with Dutch syntax and keywords, was horrible. Our language is hard enough to speak, let alone to program in. Even the non-programmers that I was trying to teach Excel thought that this was weird. Since then, Microsoft has decided to ignore their European users. (A strategy that has resulted in a $2.57 billion fine imposed by the European Union.)

I think we should all be happy that Americans have imposed their language on software developers around the world.

Just imagine how awful it would be if everyone in the world had to program against French API's on French frameworks. Anything written in French costs almost twice as many keystrokes as the English counterparts. And I really wouldn't care for diacriticals and other typical French baroque embellishments in my programming languages. France, despite being the center of Western Europe (and feeling itself the center of Western civilization) cannot offer us the simplicity that the US can offer us.

And we can be just as glad that all the other old global empires have died long before they were able to impose their difficult character sets upon everybody.

The Arab empire has given us the decimal numeral system. But many of us still blame them for not having selected the octal numeral system, despite the fact that they did give us chess, which is octal by nature. This error has already cost the software development world billions of dollars in inefficiencies, so let's be glad we're not programming in the Arab language too. And if it had been the Turks we would now all be struggling with all the variants of the letter I.

Similarly, the Chinese empire has failed long before being able to trouble each one of us with Chinese characters. Of course, China is growing again. But, even though the Chinese can choose to ignore the rest of the world at times, the standard American qwerty keyboard is here to stay.

Good old American culture gave software development simplicity and no compromises. The typical American inability to grasp the nature of special characters has given us programming languages and frameworks with an easy syntax. It's simply take-it-or-leave-it-English for everyone. And no funny British idiosyncrasies like the extra superfluous u, as in colour. That might have saved us another 0.x percent in size of various API's. I can hardly think of a better example of the KISS-principle. Because, in this case the phrase "Keep It Simple, Stupid" actually refers to people having made things simple by being stupid.

In this respect it might be interesting to note that (British) NewScientist magazine has recently published an article on the rapid evolution of the English language. It now appears that stupid non-native English speaking people (like me) are making the English language even simpler and more consistent, because we often fail to recognize the last few exceptions that the English language still has. For example, many of us simply use "informations" as the plural form of "information". And why not? Let's make it simple for everyone. We're not all French, are we?

So, let's stop attacking Americans for their simple-mindedness. Americans, like Max, have saved me a lot of trouble. So I really don't care if I have to explain to them that Copenhagen is not the capital city of The Netherlands. (It's Amsterdam.)