By Ed Wong
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As I mentioned in my last entry, I whipped up a small talk to do at last night’s Melbourne Scrum User Group meetup, which had the rough title ““Being Mr Miyagi and the Karate Kid“.
I scoured the web to find some stills from the 1984 movie and printed them onto A5 paper to show to the gathering, in this order.
- Mr Miyagi
- Daniel
- Wax on, wax off
- Sand floor
- Paint fence
- Daniel punching a target on Miyagi’s chest protector
- Miyagi and Daniel (doing a Crane stance) in the style of the Simpsons.
- Daniel fighting the Cobra-Kai at the tournament
- Daniel getting the girl
The general gist of the talk was that when you’re learning something from an expert, you may not understand why you are doing something at first (steps 3-5) but you’re probably doing it for good reason. Eventually you should benefit from the routine of doing what seem to to be unrelated tasks.
In Scrum, there are only a few roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner and Team Member), artifacts (Product and Sprint backlogs and the burndown) and ceremonies (daily Scrums, planning, reviews and retrospectives). It’s a simple framework that gives a team a focus (step 6) to start from.
Later, more advanced techniques can be used (step 7) and eventually you will have the agility to adapt to the situation at hand (step 8). The outcome of this is better development and a better product that makes the customer happy…you’ll get the girl (step 9).
The discussion after my spiel touched on points such as making sure that you inspect what you’ve been doing at regular intervals with retrospectives and adapt what you’re doing for the future. We also discussed length of iteration 1 week, 2 week, 3 week, 30 days and even half day iterations.
While typing this up, I discovered a similar post by Jeff Gothelf in New York that relates The Karate Kid with User Experience and agile. Great minds think alike, or at least similarly!
I really enjoyed this month’s meetup and I’m looking forward to the next one.
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