The other day I had an interesting thought. I’ m not sure what precipitated it exactly, but there were several things that led me to this idea I’ve been mulling in my head. Perhaps it was Alistair Coburn’s keynote at Agile 2009 where he said that Agile as a distinct entity was gone; if it was once an iceberg, it has since melted and is now just part of the ocean. It could have been Jeff Sutherland’s presentation where he points out that 84% of IT organizations are self-reporting to use Scrum. Or perhaps it was simply working with a current client when they were asking for my help to come up with very clear guidelines about the number of acceptance criteria that should be allowed for a single story. Anyway, it struck me: as Scrum grows in popularity, are we institutionalizing it? [Read more...]