In the midst of a recent LinkedIn discussion about whether scrum is a methodology or a framework, I considered a few questions:
- Do we even know if people agree on definitions of terms like methodology?
- If people haven’t established agreement on the definitions, is there any point to having the argument? (For that matter, even if they do agree on the definitions, what’s the benefit of determining the answer?)
- Furthermore, if they disagree on the definitions, is it necessarily true that one (or both!) of the people is “wrong” about what the terms mean? Is there a single “true” definition for these terms? (I’m going with no.)
Geeks are often quite opinionated. I am sure some of my friends could hardly finish the first sentence of this post before needing to tell me whether scrum is a methodology or a framework, expounding upon their definitions of these terms. And some would accept no counterarguments. They know the true definitions of these terms and anyone else is wrong.
It reminds me of this question: Is a hotdog a sandwich?
I’m imagining myself at a cookout with two people arguing about whether a hotdog qualifies as a sandwich. Carry on. I’ll be over here eating a hotdog while I watch you argue.
One of my dad’s favorite questions was: “what are you going to do with this information?” Once you’ve decided if the hotdog is or isn’t a sandwich, are you going to do anything differently?
Let’s say you argue it isn’t a sandwich because there aren’t two separate pieces of bread and it’s not getting cut in half. Or maybe you argue that it is a sandwich because it’s a filling with bread on the outside to make it easy to hold. So what? Does that change what you put on it or how you eat it?
I feel the same way about scrum. I don’t really care if it’s a framework, a methodology, a set of practices, a bunch of ideas, or a cat on a unicycle juggling a set of printed-out Jira issues.
I gather that people are concerned because methodology implies that one must follow one rigid set of rules in order to do scrum correctly. My response: it does? I just think of “methodology” as a “way of doing stuff.” I’m probably wrong.
But just like with the hotdog, it just doesn’t matter for me. Even if there is a single right way to do scrum (which I doubt, doesn’t sound very agile to me!), I don’t care. I’ll check that way out, but ultimately I’m going to do what works for my team.
People. Do what works for you. I once ate a hotdog between two halves of a slice of bread, when I ran out of hotdog buns. It was fine.
I think the only time I want to know if scrum is “a methodology or a framework or what” is when someone asks me how to define scrum.
Which actually happened a few days ago! My aunt saw “scrum” on Wordle. (We all knew it was a rugby thing, but, as a software developer, I felt I should elaborate on its use in my field.)
“Scrum is… um…”
This is where I start to go for words like “thing” because what are my own definitions of “framework” and “methodology,” anyway? I’m not sure. Not that my aunt would have argued with me.
“Scrum is a way of working for development teams,” I told my aunt. Or so I like to imagine. Because in reality my mind spun into an extended lecture on agile and modern software development practices. But that was way, way more than was called for.
So instead, I just stammered awkwardly, then I turned to my husband to see if he could rescue me with a concise way of describing scrum. Alas, he did not rescue me. Not bad for two developers who have been practicing scrum for years, including me with my PMI-ACP certification. Yeah!
Fortunately, I don’t think my aunt was actually looking for details. She just wanted to assert that “scrum” seemed a little on the obscure side to be fair game for Wordle. We didn’t need to agree on a definition here either.
I apologize if this post made you hungry.
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