Ahsen Jaffer's Blog

Scrum Evolution: Type A, B, and C Sprints July 31, 2007

I got interested in Sprint Types after reading Jeff Sutherland’s article. I wanted to implement Type B Sprint, and started to research by asking this on the Yahoo ScrumDevelopment group:

Does anyone know how many companies have successfully transitioned from Type A to Type B Sprint? or even Type C?

A week & 30+ replies later, this generated lots of discussions for & against Sprint Types, it seems to me there is a lot of confusion in the Scrum community regarding this topic. Later I realized that this is an old debate, and a year ago it was discussed that the Type B Sprint is what everyone knows / teaches as just “Sprint.”

I am sorry for rekindling this old debate, and hopefully Ken’s response will help in calming it down:

There is only one Scrum... There are many ways to fill in its blanks to optimize productivity and ROI, but those vary with each situation. I may implement Scrum differently if …but it is all Scrum.

Whoever is interested in finding more about this topic should first read the book “The Enterprise and Scrum,” I just started to.

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Investigating MDA part II November 08, 2005

In my opinion MDA has some real challenges, before it can gain widespread success.

The biggest problem I have is a philosophical one: MDA proposes that you can solve possibly any software engineering problem by starting from a high-level PIM (Platform Independent Model), and using complex transformations generate lower-level, and more detailed PSMs (Platform Specific Models), and eventually the running code.

Being a Java Developer I should be ashamed to agree with Jack Greenfield :) On a recent panel discussion (hosted here) he defended Microsoft's Software Factories vs. MDA. His biggest problem is similar to mine, "in the real world, we do not always know enough of a domain to model it effectively."

The other big problem: tons of PSMs will be required to be created and maintained. Every other month we see a new framework, or a new patch or an upgrade to the already abundant tools that we have out there. Who is going to take the responsibility of first of all creating all those PSMs and then maintaining them? The continuous requirement to update the models and the enormity of the effort itself might be a killer.

I am not saying it outright that MDA cannot be successfully at all. MDA can be a success, but under very strict situations: when the domain is very well known, and the correct PSMs exits. But as far as being an overwhelming success, I am sorry to acknowledge that it will most probably not happen, at least not in the near future.

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Investigating MDA October 22, 2005

I am investigating Model Driven Architecture, will it succeed? Or have the same fate as the CASE tools from the '80s? I got to exposed to MDA a year back when I downloaded OptimalJ from Compuware. At that time I was impressed. Now I am investigating if it's the 'real thing' as I work on a paper for my Drexel class.

In the coming days I will write again, hopefully I will have a more educated opinion by then.

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