The Scrum Alliance announced last year that Scrum creator Ken Schwaber resigned as President and Chair of the Board of Directors. This might be however not the end of the turmoil in the Agile world. Ken Schwaber was replaced October 5 by Mike Cohn, but there are now rumors that he might leave the Scrum Alliance to join the Waterfall Alliance. And this is not the only surprise that might happen soon: other unverified sources mentions that the Waterfall Alliance is also currently negotiating with Jeff Sutherland and Tom Gilb to join its board. This tells us that the near destiniy of the Agile movement is to return to oblivion. The fact that the Scrum Alliance is unable to hire a Managing Director as unemployement is reaching record level in the United States just reflects the lack of trust that software developers have in the future of the Agile movement.

Naturally, you should not believe everything that you see on the Internet and you have read all news (including this one) with a critical eye. According to our sources, Mike Cohn has realized that the spreading of Agile is a very bad thing for software developers. Any developer with a little bit of common sense will recognize that it is more sensible to sign contracts for months (years or centuries) of secure work with a traditional waterfall process than to do short weekly iterations where the customer can kill the project at any time. We all know that most of the Agile “adopters” have left Waterfall because Scrum is quicker and trendier to place on PowerPoint slides. Some people with bad intentions say that it also allows putting some nice photos of half-naked rugby players, but we do’t want to give space to this kind of trashing. Anyhow, customers may realize once that they can actually stop projects after a few iterations if they are not getting results! This will leave a lot of software developer without work, because 50% of the developers are below average (to be precise, 50% are below the median and if you didn’t see this mistake, well….). Do we really want to deteriorate further the current state of the world economy? An intelligent person like Mike Cohn has ultimately recognized that he was wrong with Agile and just wants to get back to traditional software development approaches. Naturally, this betrayal is against the short term interests of the Scrum Alliance, whose members are making tons of money currently training people to become chickens and pigs, heavily subsidized by the United States Department of Agriculture (www.usda.gov). All software developers have however to remember that it is never the farmer that ends marinated in a tandori sauce.

Waterfall Alliance Initiatives

Mike Cohn will also actively participate to the promotion of the new Waterfall Alliance program for Certified Waterfall Slave (CWS). This program is similar to the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) program of the Scrum Alliance and the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) and Professional Scrum Master (PSM) certifications that Ken Schwaber developer for Scrum.org. However, as the Slave mention in a curriculum vitae will have the strongest appeal to hiring managers, there is no doubt that the CWS program will easily beat the CSM, PSD and PSM. QED.

Tom Gilb would be actively involved in the creation of an EVO Waterfall Process, where you will be able to precisely and iteratively quantify the ambiguity of the requirements and the error of the planning estimations. Project managers will then be able to get additional budgets increase earlier in the software development process.

Jeff Sutherland would just be recruited to explain why we see Ken Schwaber so many times in the videos with an “All Black” New Zealand rugby shirt. As if there was a relationship between Scrum and rugby?!?!? Anyhow, this is part of the Waterfall Alliance “Know Thy Enemy” program that should lead to the reestablishment of the Waterfall supremacy in the software process world.

At the moment of writing, neither Mike Cohn, Tom Gilb, Jeff Sutherland or the Waterfall Alliance were available to comment on these rumors. Stay tuned with us to get more inside stories that you will never read elsewhere on the secret battles of software development process world.