Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Team: “ Coach! Coach! This agile process stuff you sold us doesn’t work! ” Coach: “ Did you build working software regularly? ” Team: “ No, it was too difficult. ” Coach: “ Did you extend your definition of Done as far as you could? ” Team: “ No, it was too difficult. ” Coach: “ Did you make quality part of your process? ” Team: “ No, it was too difficult. ” Coach: “ Did you review what you were doing at all? ” Team: “ Yes, but we didn’t like what we discovered, so we ignored it. ” Coach: “ So are you absolutely sure it was the agile process that caused you to fail? ” Team: “ Oh yes, absolutely…. ” Coach: " <sigh> " * honest....

There are times when the software industry makes me despair. Making an analogy with someone building a house, you wouldn't: Hire the cheapest cowboy builders you can to build your house. (" 'We build you house very cheap. £500', 'OK, you're the cheapest. It's a deal!' ") Hire skilled builders but force them to compromise by refusing to supply them with the resources they need (" Oh we can't let you use electricity. Or petrol - it's a fire risk. Or let you move that fence that is in the way. Or... "), restricting their working environment (" You can plaster that room, but you have to do it through the letterbox ") or by unreasonably restricting budget (" you can only buy the cheapest bricks "). Hire skilled builders but tell them how to do the job, despite not knowing anything about building (" Don't lay bricks like that. Stack them, don't overlap "). Also you wouldn't make the same mistake

Via Coding Horror : "A recent episode of This American Life interviewed Will Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples. " This is not news. In fact it's something that I and other coaches have suspected for many years. But this study provides some more scientific backing for our suspicions. In short, even one misbehaving team member can upset the entire team and endanger delivery. Getting the right people on the bus makes life much easier, massively reducing the risk of introducing agile thinking to a company and increasing the chance of successful delivery. OK, the study also suggests that a good facilitator can defuse the effect of the Bad Apple, but as the study shows , people capable of doing this are few and far between (only one team out of the entire study had a team lead capable of counteracting the problem).

Just spotted in a job ad for a lead developer: "You will be expected to implement a rigorous Agile Development process and work with the Technical Architect who will define the technologies and toolsets"

Via Simon Voice : wagile adj a cross between agile and waterfall process. The mess that's left if agile is only partially implemented without cultural change. See also: failure , compromised , doomed

One of the more interesting sessions I went to during XP Day this year was the " Have You Compromised Your Agility? " session run by Gus Power and Simon Baker. Run in World Cafe format (complete with tablecloths and candles!) it set out to create an informal environment to discuss whether corporate attitudes are forcing agile and lean thinkers to compromise a step too far in order to become acceptable to traditional corporate culture. OK, I admit it. I was a plant. No I wasn't quietly photosynthesizing in the corner, I was invited there by Gus and Simon to be deliberately provocative, forcing difficult issues out into the daylight. My table was focussed on " Values ". Specifically, the premise was that some organisations have internal Values (and hence behaviours) that do not permit agile processes to develop and prosper but instead force them to mutate into grotesque, ineffectual parodies. The reactions were interesting. On the one hand there were a handful o