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My piece today is about words used by Agile methodologies. I remain a fan of the Agile Manifesto and its backing principles as a momentous call to action. But the messaging found in the common implementations bothers me. See Manifesto for Agile Software Development for the text and signatories of the Agile Manifesto. The 2020 debacle with the Democratic Caucuses in Iowa is but one indicator that the Agile movement, at over twenty years in, has not yet achieved its promise of better, faster, cheaper. Indeed, software developers have left the movement and matters seem to be getting worse.

One of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Robert Martin (AKA Uncle Bob) has expressed considerable frustration that Agile has strayed from its humble beginnings and degenerated to a promotional vehicle for conferences, certifications, and fancy new project management strategies. In this video clip on his book Clean Agile, Uncle Bob’s frustration with Agile is palpable.

Another signatory of the Agile Manifesto is Jeff Sutherland. He has remained an ardent promoter of Agile as a project management methodology. There is an interesting TEDx Aix talk from 2014 available on YouTube where Jeff recounts the lead up to the Agile Manifesto and Scrum. It is worth viewing. Here is the link if you have not seen it, 200% more in half the time. His most current talks maintain this positive image of Agile and show no signs of the frustration exhibited by Uncle Bob.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a trained Agile methodologist. I have worked on projects that claimed, or planned, to follow an Agile methodology where trained specialists in the chosen Agile methodology led the process. On these projects I served in a variety of technical roles on the periphery of development. On other projects, I led development using a less formal lightweight methodology developed by the company I was with at the time. Our teams were self-taught on the methodology. With all due modesty, the projects where I led development were successful. The customer for one project declared the system to be the only project he ever saw that was bug free. Another project raised a single complaint, managers reported that the new system was resulting in workers doing their jobs correctly. In the interest of protecting the innocent I will not comment on the outcomes of the development initiatives led by the trained Agile methodologists.

Words are important. They shape our opinions and influence our actions, often without realization. Our choice of words frame decisions in ways we may not intend. It is this inability to anticipate how our words will be perceived that drives Madison avenue to conduct focus group studies to better understand how an audience will react to alternative word choices in their advertisements before they script them. Politicians and debaters do this as well. Frank Luntz is one of the more gifted and influential political pollsters of our age. He is credited with reducing the political urgency of carbon emissions reductions by switching the terms used to frame the issue from global warming to climate change, a more benign phrase. Another example of the insights he gained from polls and focus groups is the case for the abolition of estate taxes. His focus group testing revealed that recasting an inheritance or estate tax as a death tax would rally support for the abolition of these taxes. Frank astutely observes that intellect holds only a twenty percent stake in our decisions, the remainder is emotion. Words that make us feel are far more compelling. The title of his 2007 New York Times Best Seller, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear, drives this point home. We hear with our hearts, rather than our intellects.

The words we choose for our work shape the expectations of our customers, our teammates, and ourselves. All too often our expectations are delusional. A bias toward optimistism (optimistic bias) is well documented as one of the major pitfalls for project management and executive decision makers. Yet, as the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman advises, optimism is one of the key attributes of successful leaders. Optimists are endowed with charisma, popularity, and resilience. But optimism is a two edged sword that carries considerable risk. We must be wary of optimism and constantly vigilant of the traps that overoptimism sets in our paths. Words and titles that inflate our egos blind us to the risks that come with optimism. And our profession, under the Agile banner, has taken on some blindingly egotistical baggage. It is not so much optimism that concerns me as how we are blinded to its risks.

I want to suggest that we should be more thoughtful, and evidence based in our selection of terminology, like Madison Avenue and Frank Luntz. We should proactively shape a positive image of the approach we take to our professional engagements. Otherwise, we burden our work with subliminal messages that sabotage the planning and execution of our projects. We should avoid words that inflate egos, and choose words that foster a team spirit.

There are two words I will focus on from the Agile vocabulary in this rant, epic and sprint. These words are at the core of many Agile engagements that employ common Agile methodologies such as Scrum. But I think these are words to avoid in the context of software development because they are drenched in the kind of manly heroic individualism that blinds us to risks that we need to take note of and factor into our planning.

Epic

Epic in Agile describes a large chunk of work. Don’t get me wrong. I like the word in its normal context. But it should not be used to describe project work. We all know about the great epics of literature, long narrative poems about heroism – The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Action Adventure genre is the film equivalent of an Epic, films like the Mission Impossible series, anything James Bond, Iron Man, or really anything by Marvel Studios – the blockbuster films.

And epic fail is a thing. We use this to describe a spectacularly humiliating failure, usually involving some clueless but gutsy sap whose ego pushed him to go all-in on an obviously bad idea, and the inevitable happened. On the positive side, we use epic to laud successful outcomes, sometimes – the win was an epic achievement. Bust epic fail is much more common, and it is such a delicious phrase.

Ostensibly, epic is used in agile because epic poetry is notoriously big so it readily conveys the notion it is a big overarching chunk of functionality that is somehow related. But there are lots of other words we associate with bigness, The Ed Sullivan Show comes to mind. There must be more to the selection of epic for Agile than size. We might ask, does our profession have unspoken aspirations? The “Iliad” is an epic and it is arguably the finest work of art produced by humanity.  I honestly think it is the grand theme aspect of epic that captured Agile’s attention – bravery, perseverance in the face of adversity, heroic deeds, and courage in the face of danger. And this is what really sets me off. Our profession has chosen a word that is full of glorious aspirations to describe something that is about designing tools for others to wield, a simple craft.

And what is wrong with craftsmanship. In ancient times craftspeople were so highly valued in their communities that they often lamed key craftspeople so they could not leave for greener pastures. While laming is bad, the modern equivalent is the golden handcuff. I remember being quite thrilled as a young developer when my anchor customer declared the software my team developed for them gave them a decisive edge in the market and they did not want their competitors to have it. The golden cuffs eventually began to chafe but they had such a nice luster. Craft people create the tools the warriors of the business world wield as they fight the competition and plunder the markets. Crafts people do not risk their hides so much in the wilds of the market, but they share in the plunder.

An epic comes with a crisis so the hero can be heroic. Epic wreaks of adventure, uncertainty, suspense, rage, and, the best and worst of the human experience. We might as well be saying to our customers that we want to take them on a dangerous expedition into uncharted territories that will take a decade to complete and by the time we get home we have adult children. Our customers have enough adventure already. They face off with their competition and must win to survive, they do not need a back-office adventure distracting them with survival (theirs and ours) at stake.

Odyssey is not a good message for our customers. But we want the cache of an epic adventure in our work lives. We want to be warriors, albeit road warriors. And we want to be all-in for the good of our customers, their heroes. But hey, the epic fail thing comes back to bite us. We afflict our customers with epic fails hard and often, to the tune of a seventy percent failure rate for IT projects. And the bigger the project the more epic the fail.

An epic comes with a crisis so the warrior can either be heroic or suffer an epic defeat.

Why can’t we use duller, methodical words like marketing and football people do? They use words like campaign. We could too. It sounds organized and says a lot more about what we do than epic does. A campaign is a planned set of activities that we make happen over a discrete timeframe to achieve a goal. We use campaign in football to describe a turn with the ball when we strategically execute play by play in the march to the goal, drawing context specific plans from our playbook at each step. Our playbook makes optimal use of the talents of our team members and the skills they hone through training. A campaign is about teamwork, not the heroic actions of individuals.

Sprint

Sprint, in Agile methodologies, is a timeboxed iteration within a continuous development cycle. We absconded with the word from athletic events where a sprint is a race that is short enough (400 meters or less) that the runner does not hold anything back, they go as fast as they can from start to finish. When we use the term sprint in the context of an epic, we resonate the all-in message and claim the hero mantle.

While women sprint in athletic events in modern times, sprint still carries a distinctly manly ethos. To be all-in for the sprint is the very definition of Manhood for Kipling in his inspirational poem “If”. I should use adulthood here according to the Microsoft proofing checks to avoid gender bias, but we are talking about gender bias, and Manhood. The epic sprint brings with it a culture that puts gender bias front and center. Indeed, industry luminary Martin Fowler in a 2009 blog post characterizes badly run Scrum projects as Flaccid Scrum. The About page for Scrum.org, the flag ship home for Scrum, managed by its leading proponents, cites Fighting Flaccid Scrum as the primary reason Scrum.org was formed. Flaccid is unmanly.

Furthermore, a sprint is an individual activity. A sprinter is isolated, he stays in his lane. Sprinters claim glory by winning against the clock with a better time than any other sprinter.

And sprints are a thing in football, a nightmarish thing. Any organized footballer has experienced the wind sprints used by coaches to condition players during the two-a-day practice sessions in the heat of summer. More sadistic coaches use them as torture. Coaches often have their teams sprint in full pads, then for added fun pair players up to take turns doing wind sprints with a buddy in pads riding piggy-back. You can understand if a former footballer might shudder at the word sprint. While there may be few footballers in the IT ranks, mostly in sales I think, there are many of them across the table among the customers in our engagements. I suggest taking a few moments on your next project to look carefully into the eyes of your customers and say the word “sprint”, or better yet make it plural. If they twitch, I’m betting you are looking at a former football player.

The familiar story of the race between the tortoise and the hare provides important context for the notion of a sprint. We all know that it is the slow and steady tortoise that wins that race. The rabbit goes hard when he goes but soon distraction grabs hold and in no time the rabbit needs rest because exhaustion catches him before he reaches the finish line. Jeff Bezos uses the tortoise as the mascot for his Blue Origins company. It sets the expectation that the company is pacing itself for success. His message tells the world that Blue Origin has its eyes set on the prize. Bezos often tweaks Elon Musk of SpaceX to remind him that the rabbit (Elon = rabbit) loses the great race. Maintaining a sustainable pace is an important aspect in any large project.

So, when we use the term sprint to characterize the most granular units of work that make up our epic project, we send the following messages to our customer:
· We are working at a pace that we cannot sustain.
· We are bunnies.
· We are Manly bunnies.
· We are all-in.
· We are heroes.

This just seems silly when you put it in context. Every epic project comes with at least one crisis. We must be all-in from start to finish with every unit of work to overcome the crisis and beat the clock. And seventy percent of the time we deliver an epic fail.

Why can’t we use some other term that speak of teamwork, coordination, and a reasonable pace? March and dance are two terms worth exploring. With both these terms we are saying we will plan and coordinate our activities and carry them out at a reasoned and measured pace. Project work is about teamwork and balance so our basic terms should call that to mind.

Dancing is a more sophisticated form of motion suitable for advanced teams. When we dance, we take time up front to choreograph movements and bind them to a rhythm. But marching is often bond to music and rhythm as well. A marching band at an athletic event synchronizes complex movements on the field to their music. Armies march with drums, bagpipes, and other music.

March is a lion of a word with deep roots in the military arts. A reasonable army does not sprint to battle, it marches. One of the keys to the many successful campaigns of the Roman legions was the invention of marching. Marching is a way of getting an entire army together as a unitary fighting force from one place to another in a shorter and more predictable period of time, without exhausting them in the process so they are ready to fight when they arrive. In addition, marching enables an army to continue to move effectively under the pressures of battle.

Order, togetherness, and predictability are critical success factors. We invented marching to provide these good things. Sadistic glory hounds invented the sprint for the sake of vanity and torture. Like marching, we invented Agile to deal with the unpredictable, the unknown unknowns. Agile and marching seem a better match than sprint and Agile. We are better prepared to face the unpredictable when the actions of our team are orderly, unified, and predictable.

Marching in the software development realm does have some negative connotations in the proverbial death march. A beaten team is on a death march, they are in retreat. A team on a death march lost the right of self-determination and it is marching under external control. A death march is more akin to a sprint than a march in many respects. Often in these situations team members cannot face disaster and they are sprinting in panic for safety, like Will Farrell in “Downhill”. A death march disintegrates a team and it becomes an every-man-for-himself situation. A team working at a well-practiced march cadence is less likely to face a death march than a team that sprints.

In conclusion, we should not be sprinting through an epic project to our next epic fail. Instead, we should be marching with a spring in our step as we execute the playbook designed for our campaign with a focus on achieving the goals our customer has set for us. We are not manly heroes. We are crafts people and we should use the language of humble crafts people rather than the language of warriors.