Scrum and Fighter Aircraft

In 1993 at Easel Corporation when we started the first Scrum, I thought the ScrumMaster needed to see how to land a Sprint on a date, just like landing a fighter aircraft at the end of the runway. If you are high on the glidepath in a fighter you can easy land in the middle of the runway and if it is wet or icy can slide off the end of the runway. At the end of every runway there are trees, a deep hole, or water. It is always bad.

So the Burndown Chart along with the Scrum Emergency Procedure was developed. What do you do when bad things start to happen in a Sprint?

More specifically, what do you do when an Agile system becomes unstable?

But I digress. Jim Coplien just sent me a great video of an unstable Agile system, the latest Euro fighter. It takes 70 computers just to keep it flying and if they fail it stops flying.

Here we see a race between a Bugatti and the fighter aircraft which reminds me of the time I flew F4 Phantoms in Europe in the air while I was driving a Porsche 911 on the ground. Here the Bugatti races the fighter to the end of the runway and back while the fighter takes off, flies straight up for a mile, then does a reverse loop in an attempt to beat the Bugatti back to the takeoff point.

Click here for an exciting ride!