Is Scrum an Asperger's Friend or Foe?

Scrum, Friend of Foe

Barry, thank you for an interesting article. As to answering your question I think the answer is the usual “it depends”. The reason I say so is the following:

As a Friend:
Agile Scrum is quite rigid in its format with its ceremonies and time-boxing. You only have 4 regular meetings in one Sprint and you have one daily meeting during the sprint. Any user/stakeholder interaction can be “avoided” if the PO is writing well written stories and all supporting documentation is included and attached. This will simplify for the team as they then can pick up a story without worrying about being dependent on any non-team member being available.

As a Foe:
If the PO does not write good stories and the Scrum Master does not catch this in time the team will have to start asking a lot of questions and possibly set up additional meetings during the sprint, causing less social members stress. This extra layer of overhead is in general not conducive to people with Asperger who likes things that are set, and follows rules and regulations, and very little interaction with "others" are needed.

So, is Scrum a Friend or a Foe? Again, it all depends on the PO and the Scrum Master. They are the key players here. As I see it, if you have a PO who writes great wellformed stories and supplies all, or at least most of, the information needed for being able to pick up the stories one by one, as well as a Scrum Master who makes sure the Stories are well written and has all information needed by the team to start the story, Scrum is definitely a Friend.

If this is not the case, the resulting the lack of needed information and possibility of unpredictability will make Scrum a Foe. This sense of uncertainty and having to change the way things are done “on-the-fly" can cause great distress for a person with Asperger and/or anxiety disorders. Then again, luckily most of the time teams have members spanning from extroverts to introverts so it usually works out anyway. The extroverts take care of the outerfacing tasks while the Asperger takes care of the innerfacing tasks.

Now you can debate that the point of change and a certain amount of unpredictability is what Scrum is all about, and yes, scrum is about being able to change often and mid-project, but it is all about planned change as the change for the upcoming sprint is all planned out ahead of time in Sprint planning, and perhaps even mentioned in the Backlog maintenance meeting. This makes it easier for people who needs an amount of time to “warm up” to the change.

So in short, I personally believe Scrum is a great Friend for people with Aspergers.

Thanks Lindus for your thoughtful answer!

Hey Barry- I’ve been thinking about this as well from the perspective of building frameworks which embrace the strengths of differently abled teammates while filtering out the many hinderances and traps we fall into when trying to collaborate with diverse groups of people. Thanks for your interesting thoughts, here’s to working to build a world that appreciates all of our differences!

According to the Scrum Guide, the scrum team is a cross-functional TEAM.
Many people thinks that a cross functional team mean a team of cross functionnal characters... but, it is not the same thing i mean.

Hi, I'm an autistic machine learning engineer on an agile team. I really appreciate that you are trying to start a conversation around the overlap between scrum and autism. I just wanted to offer up a couple of corrections, for the sake of better mutual understanding:

* In many countries, including the US, "Asperger's" has been subsumed under the broader umbrella term "autism". Where this is the case, it can be seen as a bit ableist to still call it "Asperger's", as the main distinction between Asperger's (a.k.a. "high functioning" autism) is how well we are able to fit into neurotypical (non-autistic) society.
* Despite the common trope that we lack empathy, this is not generally the case. In fact, many of us are hyper-empathetic, finding the experience of others' emotions extreme to the point of being unbearable. Where we struggle is in the attempt to infer the *reasons* for other people's emotions, as we often think very differently about the same things. It turns out this problem goes both ways, with neurotypical people struggling to understand us, as well. This is referred to as the "double empathy problem" in the research literature.

Thanks for this informative post. I'm a neurotypical developer and this helps me understand the disorder.

No it doesn't and it isn't a disorder.

I found asynchronous meetings works better for aspies.