An awesome version of New Order's classic track Blue Monday performed using only instruments that would have been available in the 1930's.

Recently, during my long and quiet morning drive to work, I got to thinking about a comment a co-worker had made the previous day. BenevolentEmployer is having us use the Scrum project life-cycle on our super secret project and some of the more recent arrivals had not gone through the week-long course that the rest of us did back in the summer. Co-worker in question had attended a two day version of the course and was wondering about the reason for some of the parts of Scrum. He was curious as to why the instructor had explained the reasoning behind some parts of Scrum very clearly, yet other parts were given no rationale beyond the fact that they were in the Scrum guide and therefore that's what you did. This was unsatisfying for him.

His comments must have been churning away in the back of my head because the next morning, out popped the answer. More of a revelation or epiphany than an answer. I realized that Scrum is not for the developers, it's for the business. Scrum is a product sold to companies. As such it has a physical product they can hold and read and follow. This is the Scrum Guide. The business has no idea what computer programmers do, but they want to manage it. Waterfall methodologies have never worked, so they are always looking for something. Scrum seems to fit the need well.

The business wants to know that their projects are proceeding and that they feel as if they have some input into the whole process without actually having to understand Information Technology. The programmers want to be allowed to work on their projects without heavy-handed oversight. Scrum sits between the two camps and facilitates a formal way for each to talk to the other. Scrum calls these ceremonies and there are just enough that the business feels connected, but not so many that the programmers feel hassled. In essence, Scrum is the API to the programming team through which the business accesses them.

Public Service Announcement: There are times in a person's life when they want to say this:

As this is generally not well received, instead, I recommend the following sage advice from Skipper:

I have loved this hymn since I first heard it twenty years ago, when I came into the church. We always sang it in an up-tempo way, but many versions on YouTube are slow and warbling and kind of lame. Well, fear not ... the boys of Flatfoot 56 (a Christian Celtic Punk band out of Chicago) have produced the most rocking version of I'll Fly Away that I have ever heard. Enjoy!

(One from the archives. Written 25th February 2005. I think it still stands.)

While talking to a few of my co-workers, I mentioned my personal definition of job security and they liked it so much that I thought that I'd share it here as well, in the hope that it can equip someone else to be prepared for unexpected unemployment. The real definition of:

Job security is being able to get another job tomorrow, not still having the same job tomorrow.