Scrum Log Jeff Sutherland

Scrum is an Agile development framework that Jeff Sutherland invented at Easel Corporation in 1993. Jeff worked with Ken Schwaber to formalize Scrum at OOPSLA'95. Together, they extended and enhanced Scrum at many software companies and helped write the Agile Manifesto.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Google Gmail

Now that I have given away Gmail accounts to anyone on the PatientKeeper development team who wants one, I have a few more to pass on to people in the Scrum community.

If you have been looking for a Gmail account, send me a note. First come, first serve.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Scrum: Subsumption Architecture and Emergent Behavior


PicBot exhibiting emergent behavior

Yesterday's posting on the birth of Scrum generated some questions on Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture. One could argue that Agile processes emerge architectures by building the simplest possible thing and evolving into more complex behavior by implementing close connection of developers to code, pre-organized patterns of behavior, simple refactoring techniques, no central control, no shared representation, and short daily meetings with face to face communications.

This sounds remarkably similar to the University of Michigan AI Lab Cliff Notes on Rodney Brooks:

Brooks reasons that the Artificial Intelligence community need not attempt to build "human level" intelligence into machines directly from scratch. Citing evolution as an example, he claims that we can first create simpler intelligences, and gradually build on the lessons learned from these to work our way up to move complex behaviors.

Brooks' Subsumption architecture was designed to provide all the functionality displayed by lower level life forms, namely insects. Using a common house fly as an example, Brooks claims that creatures at this level of intelligence have attributes such as close connection of sensors to actuators, pre-wired patterns of behavior, simple navigation techniques, and are "almost characterizable as deterministic machines". The Subsumption architecture provides these capabilities through the use of a combination of simple machines with no central control, no shared representation, slow switching rates and low bandwidth communication.

Monday, December 13, 2004

Nativity Scene: How Scrum was Born!


IROBOT's Genghis Khan now in the Smithsonian

Recently, I was asked to write an article on the birth of Scrum by the Cutter Consortium. The first Scrum incubated at Easel Corporation in 1993 and was influenced by the birth of IROBOT's first robot, Genghis Khan.

Sutherland, Jeff (2004) Agile Development: Lessons Learned from the First Scrum.

Of historical interest is that I joined Easel Corporation in 1993 as VP of Object Technology after spending 4 years as President of Object Databases, a startup surrounded by the MIT campus in a building which housed some of the first successful AI companies.

My mind was steeped in artificial intelligence, neural networks, and artificial life. If you read most of the resources on Luis Rocha's page on Evolutionary Sytems and Artificial Life you can generate the same mind set.

I leased some of my space to a robotics professor at MIT, Rodney Brooks, for a company now know as IROBOT Corporation. Brooks was promoting his subsumption architecture where a bunch of independent dumb things were harnessed together so that feedback interactions made them smart, and sensors allowed them to use reality as an external database, rather than having an internal datastore.

Prof. Brooks viewed the old AI model of trying to create an internal model of reality and computing off that simulation as a failed AI strategy that had never worked and would never work. You cannot make a plan of reality because there are too many datapoints, too many interactions, and too many unforseen side effects. This is most obviously true when you launch an autonomous robot into an unknown environment.

The woman I believe will one day be known as the primieval robot mother by future intelligent robots was also working in my offices giving these robots what looked like emotional behavior. Conflicting lower level goals were harnessed to produce higher goal seeking behavior. The robots were running in and around my desk during my daily work. I asked IROBOT to bring Ghenghis Khan to an adult education course that I was running with my wife (the minister of a local Unitarian Church) where they laid the robot on the floor with eight or more dangling legs flopping loosely. Each leg segment had a microprocessor and their were multiple processors on its spine and so forth. They inserted a blank neural network chip into a side panel and turned it on.

The robot begain flailing like a infant, then started wobbling and rolling upright, staggered until it could move forward, and then walked drunkenly across the room like a toddler. It was so humanlike in its response that it evoked the "Oh, isn't it cute!" response in all the women in the room. We had just watched the first robot learn how to walk.

That demo forever changed the way the people in that room thought about robots, people, and life even though most of them knew little about software or computers.

This concept of a harness to help coordinate independent processors via feedback loops, while having the feedback be reality-based from real data coming from the environment is central to human groups achieving higher level behavior than any individual can achieve on their own. Maximizing communication of essential information between group members actually powers up this higher level behavior.

Around the same time, a seminal paper was published out of the Santa Fe Insitute mathematically demonstrating that evolution proceeds most quickly as a system is made flexible to the edge of chaos. This demonstrated that confusion and struggle was essential to emerging peak performance (of people, or software architectures, both of which are journeys though an evolutionary design space).

On this fertile ground, the Takeuchi and Nonaka paper in Harvard Business Review provided a name, a metaphor, and a proof point for product development, the Coplien paper on the Borland Quattro Product kicked the team into daily meetings, and daily meetings combined with time boxing and reality based input (real software that works) started the process working. The team kicked into a hyperproductive state (only after daily meetings started), and Scrum was born.