A recent post to the Agile Thoughts blog caused me to have a serious case of déjà vu. 

First, I will start by saying that I’m not going to take a position on the content of the post.  Namely, I’m not going to weigh in on whether or not Scrum is valid, whether or not Mary Poppendieck’s points or approach are appropriate.

The purpose of this post is to make a suggestion.

Go ahead and (re)read that post. 

Replace

• "Scrum" with "CMMI",
• "CSM" or "Scrum Master" with "Lead Appraiser", and
• "Lean" with "Agile". 

My favorite line in the entire post is this one:

"… spent 90% of her time cleaning up after bad Scrum implementations…"

And an associated comment that noted:

"…the difference between the good and the bad ones depends mainly on who’s doing it…"

I don’t feel like taking the time right now to ponder what it means (I’ll probably do it anyway after posting), but what I find fascinating is that people are now debating various agile/lean concepts in the way the debate continues to fester about CMMI/agile.  And, those in the agile/lean debate are recognizing that it’s not enough to have a named method or model, and it’s not enough to be "certified" to do something to really "get it", but that there is real need for understanding the underlying concepts and intentions and for implementing from that basis otherwise there is risk of "bad implementations".

What every perspective in these discussions is (hopefully) saying is that there is no one "silver bullet".  That addressing the issue of great products, ecstatic customers and happy teams requires more than superficial application of someone else’s ideas.  Requires more than one set of principles, when hiring an "expert" requires serious due diligence and interviewing skills, and requires a lot of hard work and soul-searching to reach the "comfort zone" of every project and team.

Again, I’m not pointing fingers and I don’t want to accuse one person of saying something they’re not, nor do I want to label an entire field of people with any one person’s perspective.  With that said, the following is drawn from my own experience and I’m merely reminded of it thanks to Tobias Mayer’s post.

Many people now finding themselves defending Scrum — against bad implementations and other abuses — are saying that it’s not anything inherent in Scrum that’s bad.  My guess is that many of these people are (or were) also among those who vilify (vilified?) CMMI.  Accusing CMMI of evils that were perpetrated by too many goobers inappropriately implementing and appraising it.  Vilifying CMMI (can be read: Scrum) by juxtaposing implementation with content.  These evils are just as much not CMMI’s "fault" as bad Scrum implementations are Scrum’s "fault".

In fact, our recent SEI Technical Note, spoke to this very issue.  I guess the point to this post is to say to those folks in the Scrum and Lean communities: Welcome Aboard!  Let’s start some constructive discussion together on defeating "silver-bullet-ism" in software development.