Empiricism drives human beings from infant stage to death - may be because of this Scrum is most popular Agile framework. Any thoughts?
I actually wanted to write this as a Blog, but could not as it is limited to PST's as of now.
Of late, opposite to my home, there is a family with an infant. Before to office and after from office, I spend some time with that infant - caring, playing etc. While preparing for my PSM2 exam and thinking about empiricism, this thought struck me like a bolt from blue.
When I observed the infant, I can clearly see empiricism - the infant inspects what we adults do and tries to adapt it quickly. And we adults also demonstrate to the infant how to do certain things - for example waving hand to say hi to some one etc. providing opportunities of inspection and adaption to the infant. Just yesterday night the infant started banging his hands on head (a gesture of frustration which we adults use - and I was curious to know how this infant caught it). Careful investigation revealed that one night before the infant's parents had a small quarrel in their bed room and the father used this gesture few times while arguing with the mother. The infant caught it just like that (rather inspected and adapted it).
Further thinking, probably you would agree with me that, during our student days (before employment), in schools Teachers demonstrate while teaching (for example remember how we all learnt alphabets - right? teachers write and show to us, ask us to adapt and practice, practice iteratively till we get hold of the letters) giving us plenty of opportunities to inspect and adapt.
Once we get into a job (in software) - well this is where there is some trouble depending on the development method we follow. At the beginning of my career, in 1993 I still remember - I write code as I was asked to by my Manager, there is one shared folder where we file transfer all our source code and related files, one Admin compiles it, builds it, if everything is OK, file transfers to other environments. This complete process is people-centric with lot of dependencies and opportunities for lack of transparency. I know very well when few files are missing, the Admin will say files were corrupted during transfer - instead of admitting missing few files for transfer. More over, the logs can be manipulated by clever Admins. What I want to say here is, in non agile way of software development, most of the times we follow what we were told to do - almost eliminating inspect and adapt opportunities. But in my coaching engagements I see new generations of developers working on agile and practicing empiricism.
Later as adults grow old, they see rapid changes in how things work around them due to advancement in technology. For example - my parents have not seen a mobile - so they try to inspect and adapt from how I am using it.
In the stages I quoted above, you could see transparency very clearly.
So, what are your thoughts on this point - we humans practice empiricism throughout our life - may be because of that Scrum has become the most popular agile framework.
Perhaps you should read some John Locke.