Introduction

Jiritsu Scrum is the good old agile scrum infused with the principles of Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) from the Web3 world.

Every software delivery team today follows Agile Scrum to delivery software.

The 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto cover everything on how teams build quality software. Jiritsu scrum adheres to all of these twelve principles and adds an additional principal of continuously rewarding the teams for direct and indirect contributions in the team.

Jiritsu Scrum is designed keeping in mind that modern workforce now mainly comprises of millennials and GenZs.

What's missing in today Agile Scrum

  In spite of the fact that there is so much information on Agile and scrum and the fact that so many certifications and courses on this topic exist, software teams have struggled to deliver with the velocity and efficiency.   There could be numerous reasons why teams aren't able to deliver at the optimal efficiency. We feel there are some intrinsic gaps in the way teams implement Scrum that leads to this inefficiency.   We try to uncover some of the gaps below:  

Story Points

The notion of story points seems to confuse teams, the fact that story points is measure of the complexity of the task but not that of the effort or time required is a bit confusing. Story Points primarily help in arriving at the capacity of a sprint, but do not consider the value delivered by that user story.  

Not recognising the Unsung Heroes

  Every agile team has unsung heroes. These are people usually who pair program with others or help their team members stuck on a pesky bug or spend time reviewing code and providing valuable feedback on code. In other cases, they are people who act at the 'glue' keeping the teams together and motivated, they could be people who do some of the legwork, like setting up the meetings or suggesting ideas. In most cases they are never the rock stars within the teams but they are the ones that keep the team moving.

Principles of DAO

DAO stands for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation and is one of the key organisational structures on the Web3 world.

On can read more about DAOs here

There are some very interesting principals in a DAO construct that can help enhance the working of Agile Scrum teams.

We feel these are the primary areas where we can enhance Agile Scrum

• Use tokens instead of Story Points.
• Reward 'Community Contributions'.
• Vote on Proposals.

Introducing Jiritsu

Jiritsu in Japanese simply means autonomy or independence.

We propose Jiritsu as an enhanced version of Agile scrum interfaced with the best practices and principles of Decentralised Autonomous Organisation from the Web3 world.

Jiritsu is a better alternative because here the entire focus is on delivering higher value and a continuous process of rewarding value creators and contributors.

Tokens instead of Story Points

  As mentioned earlier the notion of story points recognises effort and level of complexity, but it doesn’t recognise the value of the task.   As part of Jiritsu Scrum the focus is on working and delivering higher value and hence doesn't take into account the effort involved. Software delivery is very different from other industries where usually high labour/effort means higher value   As part of Jiritsu Scrum we propose using a token amount to define the value of the task. At the end of each sprint the token value of tasks completed is automatically delivered to the developer's wallet.   A few important points to call out are:  

• The value of a user story is based on the perceived business impact of that userstory.
• The value of the user story is voted by the team during backlog grooming (in most cases using Planning Poker methodologies).
• The value of the user story may not be directly proportional to the effort involved. eg: a 2-3 lines change in a core file, which may take a few hours to complete, but that improves the performance of the application by say 20% will  have a higher token value, even though it might take only a few hours to complete.   The side effect of this process is high value tasks become a priority not only for business but also for the developers as a higher value task will reward them with more tokens.

Recognising Value Creation

  One of the primary goals of Jiritsu Scrum is to continuously recognise and reward members that are creating value and empowering the scrum teams to be successful by performing activities that don't necessarily directly contribute to team velocity but are helping the teams be more efficient, engaged and motivated.   In Jiritsu the team collectively decides the various actions that contribute to value creation and assigns a token value to each activity.   Below is an example of activities and token values _ The below example assumes are you part of the Maverick DAO and using the MAVE token.

Rewards in Retros

Scrum teams carry out sprint retrospectives at the end of each sprint where they talk about What worked well, what could be better, and Action items to take during the next sprints.

As part of Jijitsu we propose teams allocate time to nominate and vote for the most impactful team members during that sprint.

The team agrees on a fixed token amount for the most impactful team member and vote on nominations. The person with the most votes gets the token transferred to their wallet.

How does it work?

As you may have figured by now, since most of the principles of Jiritsu are based on Web3, most of the tools we recommend are the most commonly tools in the Web3 world.

• The organisation procures a fixed set of tokens from the Maverick-Dao, and appoints a treasurer.

• Every team member has a digital wallet, which is where they receive their tokens at the end of each sprint for the activities performed. We recommend using the Metamask wallet. All team members maintain a master ledger with their wallet address as part of their profile information.

• The role of the treasurer is to distribute the tokens to the respective team members at the end of each sprint.

• Depending of the teams maturity in automation, teams can explore using tools like SourceCred or build custom bots that can track the value creation metrics.

• Team members can redeem their tokens against different corporate gifts and the cycle continues.

• Since the teams operate in a DAO model, and the tokens are valid crypto tokens, members and send and receive MAVEs amongst themselves. Jiritsu doesn't enforce or recommend guidelines on when and why members send and receive tokens amongst themselves.