Announcing The Swarming Development Method
By now, you’ve probably figured out that I’m laying out all the guidance for using Swarming as a legitimate, full-fledged, Agile method. It looks like this:
Swarming
There you have it. A complete method for swarming. Wrap it up and ship it.
“But wait!” you say, “You’re not a real methodologist, your just some guy with a blog!” You are absolutely right. What gives me the right to propose a new agile methodology? What kind of egomaniac thinks he can just pop up with a completely new method of team development? Well, actually, it’s not that new. I pulled a lot of the material from a variety of existing sources. I copied the format for the Values and the principles from the Agile Manifesto. Nothing here is all that original. After all, if I’m right, bugs have been doing this stuff without the benefit of my genius for millions of years. Why would I do this?
First, I’d like to state this as emphatically as I can: ANYBODY CAN DO THIS! We can all be copying methods and tweaking them – and we should. No real experience is required. After all, that’s how the guys who came up with Scrum, and Kanban, and XP did it. They copied ideas from Takeuchi and Nonaka, Ohno, Demming, Goldratt, and a whole bunch of others. We need to keep doing that – copying and stealing and mixing and removing bits until we find methods that work even better. Take this opportunity to make a methodology that is an expression of your beliefs. Heck, maybe it expresses the vision of your entire team…or company.
Secondly, there just aren’t enough methodologies out there. Having scrum taking over 80% of the agile project management ecosystem is really, really…boring. Ken Schwaber, one of the creators of Scrum, has always maintained that something better will come along one day. I’m sure that’s true, but it won’t happen unless we are creating a vibrant ecosystem of competing methods. Just having Scrum and Kanban isn’t enough.
So feel free to take this methodology – it’s yours. Run with it (careful, it’s pointy), copy it, break it, fix it, and for God’s sake, make something wonderful.
#Manifesto #theft #methodology #creation #Swarming #practice