Scrum Task Origami -
Part 2: Changing Priorities
Thursday, 11 February 2010 -- 6:30 pm
At the moment we have only folded 451 Scrum Post-It paper cranes, but our pile is getting a bit unruly. I really need to go through and string them, but I haven’t found the time. However, in true Scrum fashion, the crane-folding task has been parked for the foreseeable future.
Last week, our product owner came to my office with a picture from a technical journal article about modular software design. The image was of a massive modular origami structure, and he asked if we could make something similar:
I did a little research and ended up finding the exact image on flickr, posted by the folder himself (appropriately – a fellow programmer). It turns out that this is a Level 2 Menger Sponge crafted out of over 2,000 pieces of paper, using a style of origami module called Japanese Brocade.
The Menger Sponge was the first three-dimensional fractal ever discovered. At each level, the cube is constructed of a set of 20 of the cubes of the previous level, forming a sort of open framework. Since it takes 20 cubes to form the next level cube, the number of base cubes used in a Level n Menger Sponge is 20n.
Thanks to the nature of a fractal, we can scale back our project to a Level 1 Menger Sponge, which would be made up of only 20 base cubes and will require only 72 paper modules. We can further simplify the design by using one of the most basic building blocks in modular origami, the Sonobe module. The result of our efforst should look something like this:
This one actually looks like it could have been made from Post-Its. Unfortunately, since our color scheme is decided by our product owner (the color of the tasks on our Scrum board have a pre-defined meaning), the resulting coloring of our Menger Sponge will be fairly random.
We started working on the model last week, and already we can see some significant progress:
Ours is definitely messier than the one pictured above, but I’m hoping that as more of the model is completed, it will become a little more structurally sound. Either that or it will just completely fall apart!
If everything goes well, after we finish the Level 1 Menger Sponge, we may actually try to build a Level 2. I’ll let you know how that goes!
Related posts:
Scrum Task Origami
Scrum Task Origami – Part 3: Iterative Development
Scrum Task Origami – Part 4: Project Estimation
February 11th, 2010 at 9:06 pm
You lost me at ‘the nature of a fractal’, but it looks like a cool project! Can’t wait to see if it works!
February 12th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
This is my favorite geeky post to date!!!! I SO want to make one too!!!
April 20th, 2010 at 11:46 am
One of the joys of releasing content under the Creative Commons licenses is that you never know who will find you. I, too, have worn the scrum master hat, and I wish you and your team the best of luck in assembling your level 1 Menger Sponge. I suggest constructing a burndown chart to track your progress!
I am curious: which journal thought an image of my brocade sponge would be relevant to software design, and what was the connection? The “Don’t Repeat Yourself™” mantra of sound software design seems to directly contradict the mantra for modular origami: “fold the same module over and over until you have enough to put something big together.”
April 21st, 2010 at 11:59 am
It was used as illustration for “OSGi: Modularity without restarts for Enterprise Java Applications” in a local Norwegian IT training company’s course catalog.