Crystal, the Un-Methodology
October, 2024
Crystal - a "Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams" - was developed at the same time as Extreme Programming (XP), in the late 1990s. XP was so popular that I didn't published Crystal except to a few readers. As XP grew too dominant, people asked me to publish it as the "antidote" to too much XP. Then Scrum grew too dominant, and people asked me to publish it as the "antidote" to too much Scrum. I published the book in 2005. Now SAF3 is too dominant, and people are asking me to publish it as the "antidote" to too much of that.
It's time to go back and look at what makes Crystal so effective. Lightweight, human-powered, for small- and medium-sized times, it comes in three colors: Clear, Yellow and Orange, for teams up to about 50 people. More people than that and you're on your own 🙂.
Crystal is based, not on ceremonies or rules, but *properties*, the 7 Properties of Highly Effective Teams (with apologies to Steven Covey). Describing it via properties allows you to follow your own path to achieving those properties without insulting your intelligence about how to get there, and without inflicting your with rules.
Crystal has been used successfully since 1998, and still is in use in some places. People who use it don't have much to say, except "It works."
PDF of the slides here here: https://alistaircockburn.com/Crystal the un-methodology.pdf
