Moscow – not about POTUS #45, for a change…

Tom Breur

14 July 2018

Moscow is an acronym from early agile-related practitioners. I heard it being used myself in the late 90’s, in the context of DSDM, originally developed by Dai Clegg. MoSCoW stands for Must, Should, Could and Won’t. It signifies the outcome from prioritizing user stories or features within a development cycle (a “Sprint” in Scrum parlance). Use of this acronym predates February 2001 (when he Agile manifesto was conceived) by at least five years, to my knowledge (presumably 1994). And although Scrum saw the light in the latter half of the nineties, it wasn’t nearly as dominant and well known at the time, as it is today.

When I read Frederick Brooks’ “Mythical man month”, which was published at a point in time when written specification were still the norm, and well before Rapid Application Development (RAD) (James Martin) & Spiral (Barry Boehm) came to the fore, I was struck by the number of comments that hinted at his “understanding” of agile. Brooks’ fundamental premise is that even if you engage with nine women, they still cannot conceive of a baby in one month. I recently came across this funny Tweet, along the same lines:

When you work in agile mode and try to avoid BDUF, many things change. Work assignment and prioritization has to change. Time can not be compressed or expanded, so you need to scale to capacity. That is where MoSCoW can help to guide the dialogue between the on-site customer (Product Owner in Scrum) and developers. You need some slack in the schedule to creatively ‘solve’ those features that are easiest or cheapest to make. You want to deliver value early and often. Dialogue is the most powerful tool to surface priorities from the PO’s side. Slack is necessary wiggle room to enable teams to ‘own’ the schedule and drive self-organization. Together, they might just create some magic…