War and Software development strategies - Part 1. Fundamentals

We are going to start with some of the fundamentals. And that of course would be…

Scrum

A war pilot being told that requirements have changed, and he has to land a submarine instead of a plane

A well-known fact both creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, and Ken Schwaber, fought in the Vietnam war, Ken as a marine, Jeff as a flight officer. Many of the principles in SCRUM actually follow the principles war pilots used during the war.

“When I graduated from the U.S. Military Academy I had a chance to go to pilot training and join the Air Force. I wound up flying 100 missions over North Vietnam in an RF-4C Phantom. Over half of us got shot down so I devised a risk avoidance strategy that is embedded in Scrum. The burndown chart is based on what you need to look for to land a high-performance jet at the end of the runway” — Jeff Sutherland

Kanban

We all know about SCRUM, but what about Kanban? based on Lean manufacturing, car production, purely Sullivan, right?

Well, there’s an opinion that Kanban actually originates from the simplest visual stock replenishment signaling system, an empty box. This was first developed in the UK factories producing Spitfires during the Second World War, and was known as the “two-bin system.”

Toyota as a creature of war

KISS principle

Kiss a very important principle that correlates to the United States Armed Forces nine principles of war that evolved from Sun Tsu art of war, where the ninth states:

Simplicity — Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and concise orders to ensure thorough understanding. Everything in war is very simple, but the simple thing is difficult… — USA — nine principles of war

When you come to your manager saying you want to quit

We all know how an overly complicated code looks like, right?

3 points estimation — PERT

Fixing a bug in a code with 0% test coverage

The program (or project) evaluation and review technique (PERT) is a statistical tool used in project management, which was designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project and following through a scenario. First developed by the United States Navy in 1958. In three-point estimation, three figures are produced initially for every distribution that is required, based on prior experience or best-guesses:

• a = the best-case estimate
• m = the most likely estimate
• b = the worst-case estimate

War rooms

A retrospective never goes wrong, right?

Another concept is actually war rooms usually placed in a bunker or an HQ in IT actually moved to open spaces. The idea of a war room is to physically gather the entire team into a ‘single location’ to facilitate communication, problem-solving, risk mitigation, and status reporting.

The single location can be physical, virtual, or some combination of the two based on the specifics of the organization’s structure. A good example would be organizing teams by the product they deliver instead of dividing them by skill set.

In part 2 we are going to talk about Sun Tsu and the Art of war. Gear up and follow the link soldier!