I was presenting Scrum as Agile method for project development on University of Technology in Wroclaw. During coffee break one of the students came to me and ask me a question about the Scrum Team, Product Owner and Scrum Master. During short discussion I compare Scrum Team to black box and I found it very interesting.

I don’t know why I use this comparison. Maybe just because during my studies on this university I spend lot of time working with black boxes (while I was studying robotics). Black box is something which has an input and output. You can’t tell what is going on inside that box but you can change input and check output. So, now imagine that (from Product Owner perspective) Scrum Team is like black box. Product Owner just gives Product Backlog Items and waits for the output. He or she doesn’t know (or at least should not care) what is going on inside the team. What is she or he interested in is just the output (which are Product Backlog Items done in the way Definition Of Done describes it).

What is more interesting on this black box there is a big red button which is called “Sprint reset” which can be used to reset team iteration. You can do it as you can do with your PC with the same result – everything which is in progress will be lost.

I found this picture very interesting and descriptive, what do you think about it? From my studies I know that we can connect controller (and also observer) with feedback loop to it which will allow you to control it with more precision. I am curious if this can be used to describe Scrum process… I have to think about it .