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This is the part I wrote first. All the other parts were written to justify this coldhearted analysis on what should be the role of management in Scrum. I was convinced that there had to be something more for management to do than “support the team and get out of the way.”

Over the years, managers of all stripes, engineering managers, product managers, project managers, manager managers have complained to me, usually as a stage-whispered aside, that “agile is dead” or “scrum is not agile.” Their frustration seemed to come from several places: the lack of promised accelerated productivity, the lack of visibility (other than the sphinxlike story point’s slow burndown), and complicated answers to simple Waterfall milestone status questions.

We managers, of all flavors, have layered on a whole superstructure of improvements on top of Scrum in our quest for certainty in an uncertain world. But let’s look ourselves in the selfie: Have these improvements worked? Have we improved Scrum? Have we delivered more certainty than what Scrum originally promised? No.

Working through the Computer Science foundations of Scrum, the data structures and algorithms, I realized that all these improvements to Scrum brought about by managers like me haven’t improved Scrum but obscured a scientific model of work under a fog of superstition, old husband tales, and best practices.

So, now, after all this, what really is the role of Management in Scrum?

Scrum is system and humans are its parts

First, a quick summary of parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5

• I read a book on Scrum by the inventor and co-creator of Scrum and his son
• I read this book because while I’ve been supporting Scrum for more than a decade, I kept hearing about how Agile is dead and Scrum is not Agile.
• I realized two insights from a close reading of the book: managers have no formal role in Scrum (autonomous teams don’t need managers) and there is a hardcore computational basis for the many of the processes that people follow in Scrum.
• I further realized that if you don’t treat these data structures and algorithms for what they are, you don’t get the productivity and team happiness benefits of Scrum.

I bet, as an experienced scrum master, you already knew all this. But most of the management folks I run with don’t think of Scrum as a computational system. We managers tend to see Scrum as a set of new best practices for project management. This is a little like seeing Astronomy as a new a better way to cast horoscopes for Astrology.

Scrum, at its heart, is a computational system that creates a human-based machine. Scrum uses this human-based machineto accelerate productivity by removing waste from the work process. The secret of Scrum is in the constraints it puts around inefficiencies but not around creativity. The beauty of Scrum is in its economy of design. This design enables Scrum to apply to a wide range of work problems (not just software development). A side effect of Scrum is that the human-machine manages itself and its moving parts (team members) are happier than they are in with a traditional manager managed process.

If Jeff Sutherland, like Jeff Bezos, had built a private platform out of Scrum instead of a public framework, he would be rocketing people to Mars and tooling around on his billion-dollar yacht.

Treat people like machines

OK, fellow managers, here is my advice (caveat emptor)

First, leave Scrum alone. Don’t fix it. Don’t do pre-work outside of the Sprint. Don’t tell the Sprint team or the Scrum master what to do or how to do it. Let the Scrum process fix itself over time.

Second, fix the problems outside of Scrum with formal computation systems (human machines) for those folks left out of the Scrum process. Translate your work into data structures and algorithms and eliminate waste. Don’t worry about whether the computation will be performed by silicon or carbon.

Scrum does an excellent job of work-as-computation at high efficiency. It does this by creating formal roles for the people who Sprint and ensuring that all work is filtered for priority and done with in a predictable, repeatable, time-boxed process.

BTW, this process of treating people like machines is nothing new!

The first computers were not made of silicon and software. They were people. For thousands of years people were doing the computing that enabled empires to trade, businesses to serve customers, and NASA to send rockets to the moon. Only within my lifetime have we delegated computation to non-humans.

I sense your eyebrows rising sharply! Managers who treat people like machines are inhumane.

And you are right. If we don’t follow Scrum’s model of how to compute well with people, then we managers are the living incarnation of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. We are micromanagers who make buzzwords out of useful tools like Agile, Scrum and DevOps. But if we don’t treat our people like machines what are we treating them like? Resources? Head counts? Soft capital?

So, if you think about it, as a manager, you pretty much treat your people like machines at some level. You give them tasks, expect them to ask relevant questions, and then to do the task to your specifications by the due date. You expect high-functioning employees to work well with vague input and all the rest to require SMART input. You don’t expect the employee’s feelings to impact the work. You are not a monster, but you have a business to run.

It is interesting to note that the people-treated-like-machines who follow a Scrum practice are far happier than their beleaguered and belabored non-Scrum counter parts Why is that?

Formal (systems) beats casual (anything)

I know we live in an age of the casual work environment. Dress codes are relaxed, hours are flexible, and hierarchies, while still in use, have been hidden away like ugly relics of a less enlightened age. But only the outside of the workplace is casual. On the inside our workplaces are just as formal as they have always been. I believe the patina of unscripted, casual interaction has made the workplace hard to navigate and an unhappier place.

Let’s contrast the formalism of Scrum with the casualism of the rest of the office:

	Scrum	Non-Scrum
Workload	Prioritized backlog (sorted queue) locked during the Sprint.   Lee just sent a high priority email. Scrum master will take care of it for me!	Multiple uncoordinated sources that can change at any time.    Lee just sent a high priority email. Should I drop everything to work on it?
Workday	Defined by the sprint as a loop of predictable duration, where the team commits to a specific number of story points and a daily check-in meeting.   I can completely focus on my stories and if I get blocked the scrum master will unblock meI only have one meeting a day, so I don’t have to rudely work on my laptop during that meeting.	Multiple uncoordinated open ended workstreams with soft deadlines that demand multitasking.   I can’t focus completely on Lee’s request so it’s going to take days instead of an hour or two. I have so many meetings that I have to work on my laptop during each! I should also work during lunch and stay late but I’m feeling low energy and the kids need help with their home work.
Work unit	Story point: a well described task with a set business priority and expected labor value such that worker knows if they are spending too much or too little time.   I tested, documented, and committed my code. My teams are doing a code review and will get back to me with feedback shortly. I know for myself that my work is on track, so I’ll start on my next story.	An email, a document, a presentation, a spread sheet, a list with no definition of done or labor value.   I sent Lee a deck, but I had to bump my other work to complete it. Is it finished? Should we meet to review it? Will my boss get a call from an angry department head because of all the bumping?
Work team	Product owner, scrum master, and a specific set of developers. Nobody else is on the team.   I know exactly who is working with me on this project. Lee is the EVP of XYZ but I don’t have to worry about that. The Scrum master will take care of it.	Probably the people on the email you just got.    Is Lee working on this project of is Lee a stakeholder?  Even Lee isn’t sure so to be safe just CC Lee on everything! The RACI is always out of date!

We can easily see why the members of a Scrum are happier than the members of a Non-Scrum. Formalism brings clear boundaries so that employees know what they are doing, how well they are doing, and when they are finished. Non-Scrum team members might work all night on a project and find they failed because they didn’t work with the right info, or the right people, or the right priority. This kind of work-tragedy brings tears of frustration to the most experienced and valuable employees and leads to cynicism and other productivity busters that we managers are supposed to be managing out of the organization!

Because Scrum embraces and thrives on change the RACI is never out of date! Inside the sprint the priorities, the work to do, the due dates, the team members, and the estimated labor values do not change! Outside the sprint management brings everything the team has to do up to date. As a manager who prides himself on closing and finishing, I love the elegant efficiency of Scrum. I don’t know how other managers in other departments cope without Scrum.

We managers need not to fix Scrum but to fix ourselves. The dev team has become super effective. We, engineering management, product management, project management, and all the other managements need to catch up. We need formal systems of our own, similar to Scrum in the sense that they use data structures and algorithms to eliminate waste and accelerate work. 

Pavley.com presents, the penultimate episode of ITSAM! Starring the algorithms of Scrum. The computational thinking that makes it possible to do “twice the work in half the time.”

Last episode, part 4, starred the story point as a data structure of enumerated values and its function as a signal of complexity. Story points are expressed as Fibonacci numbers, ratios of intuitively accelerating magnitude. The humble but nuanced story point is like the pitch of the teeth in the gear that runs your sprint iteration: The finer the pitch (smaller the story point values) the faster your productivity flywheel turns.

In this episode we turn away from story points and take a step back to discuss four unambiguously defined recipes that precisely describe a sequence of operations that drive the Scrum process. Scrum is often visualized as a set of nested loops and we’re going to do the same. These loops take an input state, the backlog, and transform it by iterations, into an output state, working software.

Ah, but there is a catch! People are not machines. We tend to mess with the sequence and order of Scrum operations and derail the efficiency of its algorithms and then wonder why “Agile is dead.”

The algorithms of Scrum

What an algorithm is and is not is critical to understanding how to Scrum. Get it right and the Scrum fly wheel spins faster and faster. Get it wrong and the Scrum fly wheel wobbles and shakes, eventually flying off of its axis.

At the surface, almost any well-defined and repeatable process is an algorithm. Counting on your fingers, singing Baby Shark, and the spelling rule i before e except after c are more or less algorithms. To be a true computational algorithm all variation has to be nailed down. If human judgement is required in implementing an algorithm, as in knowing the random exceptions to the i before c rule, the algorithm isn’t reliable or provable. 

Jeff and JJ Sutherland, in their book Scrum: The Art of Twice the Work in Half the Time, don’t mention algorithms. Probably because what I’m calling algorithms don’t strictly fit the Wikipedia definition. But I believe if we refine these processes as close to true computation as we can get, Scrum works well. I believe it because I’ve seen it! So, let’s take a quick survey of each core algorithm in turn–we’re looping already.

The sprint (outer loop)

The outer loop of Scrum is the sprint. It’s a relatively simple Algorithm.

// pseudo-code implementation of a sprint loop
while value of epic count doesn’t yet equal 0 {
  play planning poker() with highest-priority epic
  for each work day in sprint duration {
  	standup() with sprint backlog for 15 mins
  }
  demo()
  if demo is not accepted {
    throw sprint broken error()
  }
  retrospective()
}

I like the idea of the sprint as algorithm because there isn’t a lot of room for human creativity. But there are a few hidden constraints!

• Scrum doesn’t want you to rest or waste time between sprints. Start the next sprint on the next working day.
• Scrum wants the whole team participating in the sprint.
• Scrum doesn’t want you to start new a sprint before the last one has completed.
• Most importantly: Scrum wants all development activities to take place inside the sprint. This constraint creates a huge headache for product management, UX design, and QA as they are commonly practiced.

One reason Agile is dead and Scrum’s hair is on fire is that anything that happens outside the sprint is not Scrum, does not go fast, and creates terrible stories. 

For example, designing all your screens upfront with focus groups is not Scrum. Manually testing all your code after the demo is not Scrum. Skipping the demo, adding more engineers during the sprint, or asking engineers to work harder is not Scrum. The sprint loop with its constraints works really well if you don’t do any work outside the sprint!

Planning poker (pre-condition)

The first thing a Scrum team does on the first working day of a sprint is to plan. The core of that meeting is the planning poker algorithm. It takes patience and practice to get right.

// pseudo-code implementation of planning poker
while consensus is not true {
  product ower explains story
  team asks clarifying questions
  for each developer in sprint team {
    compare story to previously developed story
    estimate work using story point value
    present estimate to team
  }
  if story points match {
    set consensus to true // breaks the loop
  }
}

The goal is to transform an epic into a prioritized backlog for the sprint. That means to break a vague unworkable narrative into a specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) story—and discovering new stories in the process. The result of planning poker is pre-condition, a state to which the backlog needs to conform, to enable a successful sprint.

In many Agile processes an epic is sometimes groomed or broken into stories before the sprint. It’s an honest attempt to get ahead of the game. But, honestly, breaking down an epic without the team playing planning poker means you get all the bad qualities of Waterfall–the qualities that Scrum was created to avoid.

Daily standup (inner loop)

Have you ever been stuck in a status meeting with no ending in sight and most of the participants in the room paying attention to their phones and not the person speaking? The daily standup algorithm was created to banish the status meeting from the realms of humankind.

// pseudo-code implementation of daily standup
accomplishments = List()
today's work = List()
impediments = List()
timer() start for 15 minutes
  for each developer in sprint team {
    announce() accomplishments, append to team accomplishments list
    announce() today’s work, append to team today’s work list
    announce() impediments, append to team impediment list
  }
  if timer() rings {
    throw standup duration error()
  }
}
timer() stop

I personally think this algorithm works for all types of work, not just development. Without a strict, formal model to follow, status meetings become planning meetings, brainstorming meetings, complaint sessions, political battle grounds, ad in finitum.

High performing Scrum teams hardly ever drift from the classic daily status formula as described by Jeff Sutherland. Unfortunately, I’ve seen struggling teams given into temptation and turn a good daily standup into a bad trouble shooting meeting. Don’t do it! Go around the room, check the boxes, and follow up with a cool head after all the accomplishments, today’s work, and impediments have been collected (so you know to start with the most urgent issues).

Retrospective (post-condition)

I have to admit that the retrospective is my favorite part of the sprint process. If you do it well and stick to the algorithm a poor performing Scrum process naturally evolves into a high performing Scrum process.

// pseudo-code implementation of daily standup
keep doing = List()
stop doing = List()
change = List()
for each member in sprint team {
  // includes product owner, devs, any other core team members
  announce() what went well, append to the keep doing list
  announce() what didn’t go, append to the stop doing list
  announce() what needs to change, append to change list
}

Like the daily stand up it takes a surprising amount of resolve to stick to the plan and not turn the retrospective into a war crimes trial or a cheerleading exercise. Oddly, the other major problem with the retrospective is lack of follow-up! We get these great lists of things to repeat, to stop repeating, and to change but many times they go nowhere.

It’s important to drive the items on each list into SMART territory so that a manager can do something about them. Noting that “the backlog was not well groomed” or “the stories needed more refinement” just isn’t enough signal to result in a meaningful change. And, of course, there are issues that can’t or won’t change. They have to be worked around.

While the retrospective is very much like a computational algorithm your response to its findings has to be creative and bold. After every retrospective I expect a scrum master to barge into my office, interrupt whatever I’m doing, and hand me a list of what must change. It’s the one output of the Scrum process that an engineering manager can participate in and it doesn’t happen often enough!

As our heroes, the algorithms of Scrum, walk arm-in-arm into the sunset let’s review the basic tenet of we what learned: The more you treat the sprint, planning poker, the daily standup, and the retrospective like the gears in a clockwork engine, the faster that engine runs. There is plenty of room outside of these algorithms but resist the temptation to add value. You’ll probably be surprised at how Scrum works when you respect it and don’t try to fix it.

In our next and final installment of ITSAM I’m going to actually talk about management: If a manager’s job doesn’t involve giving orders, taking temperatures, and holding people accountable–what is her job? Why do we even need managers if we have Scrum?

Our story so far: in part 3 I described the Scrum team as a data structure—an undirected graph. I tried to show how the properties of an undirected graph predict how a Scrum team behaves and how it can be optimized for productive behavior. Part of that optimization is keeping teams small, eliminating hubs, and breaking the sprint if anything doesn’t go as planned. Undirected graphs are harsh but if we respect them, they will reward us.

Today we’re looking at the third major data structure of Scrum: the story point. OMG! Let me just say that story points are the most powerful and most misunderstood idea in Scrum. Because story points are expressed as integers, its hard for even for experience engineering managers like me not to mistake them for integers.

The story point

This series of blog posts has become for me, my own A Song of Ice and Fire. Author George R.R. Martin originally estimated that he was writing a trilogy. But as Martin started writing, the series became six and now seven books. Honestly, I don’t trust Martin’s estimate of seven books. Given how popular “Game of Thrones” has become, if Martin lives forever, I expect he will be writing ASOIAF books forever.

When I started out writing an Introduction to Scrum and Management, I took my detailed notes from reading Jeff and JJ Sutherland’s book Scrum: The Art of Twice the Work in Half the Time and estimated I could express myself in three blog posts, maybe four just to be on the safe side. I need to time box my projects as spending too much time on any one project steals valuable time from others. As you can see from the subtitle of this post (Part 4 of 5 or 6) my estimate of the number of parts continues to increase. My project is over budget and the final post is delayed!

Jeff Sutherland, a good engineering manager, knows that people are terrible at estimating effort. Sutherland knows that less than one third of all projects are completed on time and on budget. He also knows that there are many reasons for this (poor work habits, under- or over-resourced teams, impediments that never get addressed) but the root cause is our inability to estimate timing (unless we have done the task before and have transformed it into a repeatable process).

The problem with writing fantasy novels and software is that they are not repeatable processes.

This is why Sutherland invented story points and George RR Martin still write his novels with WordStar running on a DOS PC. Since Sutherland and Martin cannot control the creative process, they put constraints around it.

The story point was invented by Jeff Sutherland because human beings really can’t distinguish between a 4 and 5. Jeff was looking for a sequence of numbers where the difference between each value was intuitive. Jeff realized that the Fibonacci numbers, a series of numbers that are known as the Golden Ratio, were the perfect candidates to do the job of estimating work. Art lovers, architects, mathematicians, and scientists, all agree that the world around us is built upon a foundation of Fibonacci numbers.

I could muse for endless paragraphs on how Fibonacci numbers are so elegant that they enable artists and artichokes alike to create beautiful compositions. But let’s just take Fibonacci numbers for granted and see how they are used to implement story points.

Here are the first eight Fibonacci numbers. It is easy to see that as the numbers increase in value the difference between each number increases. This acceleration in difference is in harmony with our ability to detect fine differences at a small scale but not a large scale.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21

Each number in the sequence is the sum of the pair of numbers that immediately proceed it. You can do the math if you don’t want to take my word for it!

A diagram of Fibonacci squares shows the magnitude of Fibonacci progression nicely.

But let’s back up a bit. Why do we need Fibonacci numbers? We’re developing software not paintings or artichokes!

In Scrum a story is a simple description of a chunk of work to do. A sprint is a repeating and limited duration of time in which to do work. Since the work to be done is creative, it can’t fully be understood until the worker is doing it. Thus Scrum constrains process of doing the work but not the work itself.

In summary

• Stories constrain the definition of work
• Sprints constrain the time allotted to work
• Story points constrain the amount of work based on a story that is planned to be executed during a sprint.

If you have done something before, and absolutely nothing has changed, then you don’t need story points. But almost all software development projects involve new requirements, new technologies, and new techniques. When planning a software development project, the big problem is where to start. It’s hard to know how to break down a big project into nicely workable chunks.

Story points get the developers and product owner talking about where to start and how to break the problem down. In discussion during the sprint planning meeting, 13-point stories are broken into several 8-point stories. 8-point stories are broken down into many 5-pointers. And so on until all that is left are dozens if not hundreds of 1-point stories (which are, by their nature, very well understood stories).

Scrum masters and engineering managers know that a 13-point story isn’t dividable into one 5-pointer and one 8-pointer! A backlog of story points is not communicative, associative, or distributive like the ordinary numbers we grew up with. Story points can’t be added, subtracted, multiplied or divided together.

We also know that one team’s 13-point story is another team’s 21-point story. Story points are relative to the team, they change in value as the team gets better (or worse), and are not comparable unless the same people have worked together on the same project for hundreds of sprints.

As a data structure the enumerated values of story points are a wonderful set of flags, where the different between each flag is intuitive. Story points are signals not units.

Alright, this blog post was a bit long but in my defense story points are a nuanced concept. I think we’re just about at the end–which should be a relief to all of us. The good news is that my ability to estimate has significantly improved by doing the work. In the next blog post I’m going to talk about the Algorithms of Scrum.

Next, the penultimate episode, part 5