For each new school of thinking models of that thinking are built, believed, proposed and adopted but also interpreted literaly. So on the note of my last post I’d like to quote George Box, “All models are wrong, some can be useful.” I try to live by this quote when I teach and coach. Believing in models as a true depiction of the real world are not only fundamentally wrong but also leads to fundamentalism or versusitis.
I found a wonderful definition of properties of a model which you might consider benchmarking your favorit model against, be it Scrum, XP, CMMI, Lean, Kanban, RUP or the process models of your own company.
I like the link on what to require from a model. For practitioners (as opposed to philosophers) it is ultimately about usefulness. Philosophers may wonder if there even is a reality out there. Perhaps models are all there is? I wrote about excessive model complexity in my latest blog post (talking about RUP :)). -Arto