Your Own Pattern Language

Maybe you used this book to build and grow a sequence for your first Scrum organization. Maybe it worked well and you learned some things and you found an opportunity to repeat the experience with a new product, a new Scrum Team, and a new Value Stream. The sequences may have been different for each one. Maybe you even added new patterns that applied only to some of the developments and not to others.

As described earlier, this book describes a (not the) pattern language for value streams and a (not the) pattern language for product organizations. You started with those and created your particular sequences for your particular value streams and organizations. Maybe all of these were within the same organization, or perhaps just the same industry, such that most of the patterns were common to all of them but some of the patterns customized the value stream and organization for a particular context. It might be that you have your own pattern language that is a unification of the sequences you have discovered.

After all, when we wrote this book, all we had was a sea of patterns and the sequences people used to weave them together. Looking at the possible combinations of patterns in the sequences, we then created the languages in this book. You can do the same thing for your own organization or industry, starting with the patterns you used in your sequences and combining them into a single language that all your Scrum Teams can share. For example, let’s say that you discovered these sequences:

Maybe A, B, and C are from this book and the rest are patterns that you have discovered. You might express a language that will generate all of these sequences this way:

You don’t have to factor all of your patterns into the common language. Individual Scrums can just maintain their own local variant patterns if they have unique, local needs. All of the Scrums, along with management and potentially other stakeholders, should meet about once a year to review new patterns, retire outdated ones, and to otherwise update the pattern languages. This becomes a powerful way for organizations to manage their process knowledge and to share ideas about how to make Scrum work in different parts of your organization or industry. You might organize one of your first Birds of a Feather to develop the sequence for rolling out Scrum in your organization. That same Birds of a Feather or another one like it might be the body that meets annually to evolve your shared pattern languages.

With regard to adding your own patterns to your project language, we send our cautious encouragement. One does not decide to create a new pattern lightly. A pattern earns its wings by building on multiple known examples (we use a rule of thumb that there must be three independently discovered prior examples) by being able to let forces resolve themselves, and by adding to the Quality. Remember that patterns are not just techniques and are much more than just a way of documenting how you do things. Alexander tells us repeatedly that each pattern has a moral grounding, and that a good pattern is morally profound ([1]). Further, he writes:

And there is an imperative aspect to the pattern. The pattern solves a problem. It is not merely “aˮ pattern, which one might or might not use on a hillside. It is a desirable pattern; and for a person who wants to farm a hillside, and prevent it from erosion, he must create this pattern, in order to maintain a stable and healthy world. In this sense, the pattern not only tells him how to create the pattern of terracing, if he wants to; it also tells him that it is essential for him to do so, in certain particular contexts, and that he must create this pattern there. ([2], p. 183.)

In short, be guided by what may be the two most important patterns in this book: the first one, and one of the last ones—The Spirit of the Game and Greatest Value, respectively. Patterns are not a tool that helps one set of people control another. They are a way for a community to celebrate and leverage the small, selfless, daily acts that add up to a great team, environment, and product, and which weave into the core moral fabric of a community—of your community. Not all of your patterns will be morally profound, but you should nonetheless set that before yourself as a goal. Tirelessly refine your patterns to add new insights and to ever make them more literary, more human, and more profound.

[1] Christopher Alexander. The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World. In IEEE Software 16(5), Steve McConnell, ed., September/October 1999, pp. 72-82.

[2] Christopher Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 183.