Back to proposals-2013

Title: Scrum and evolution - what can we learn?
Proposer: matt_turner
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 90 minutes
Description:
Using scrum to develop software, we seek to continually improve our product and also our team. We aim to be as responsive as possible to changes in our environment and our competitors. We think of something, make the change (to our code or our working practices) and let the market evaluate it. We accept or reject the new code as better and repeat the process from there. I posit that this is similar to the natural evolution of species – pieces of code, like individuals in a population, are mutated, cross-bred and evaluated. Only the fittest survive to the v1.0 release.

The field of genetic algorithms is an optimisation technique, but it takes inspiration for its method from natural evolution. By applying ideas like mutation and breeding it is able to effectively search large solution spaces. The solutions can even be entire software programmes. However it faces the same problems as natural evolution, like over-specification. Does scrum suffer from these pitfalls? What else can scrum learn from nature, and of what should it be wary? This talk will cover the basics of natural evolution, genetic algorithms and scrum – all interesting topics in themselves. It will then compare and contrast them, and ask if there is anything we can learn from the world around us to apply to our agile development.

Roger: weakly in favour
[Ewan: MAYBE. Overlap with Chris Simons?]