Update: I’ve just noticed that WP removes links in comments … bugger!! So, I’ve extracted the URL’s so that you can follow them.

A number of people have asked for more details about the Squirrel Burger exercise. Joe Tenczar wrote a nice description on the ScrumDevelopment mailing list, here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/message/8798

The exercise is really about assuming risk inappropriately. It’s easy to see when it’s cast as the Squirrel Burger story, but much more difficult to see in our day-to-day behaviour. Many participants will feel ill when I walk them through the exercise, but will happily behave in exactly this way during their professional lives.

So, how does this relate back to technical debt? Assuming risk inappropriately is the root course of the problem. When we (and I include myself here, because I’ve been guilty of this in the past) compromise quality in order to deliver a fixed set of functionality in a given time, we make a decision that’s not ours to make. We deliver a Squirrel Burger. Ken argues in his infamous “Canary in a coal mine” presentation that, if quality is to be compromised then it’s ultimately a CXO decision. The video can be found here:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/agile-quality-canary-coalmine

Thanks,
Dutch Driver