Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Working as a jack-of-all-trades agile coach, one of the biggest problems I face is the stagnation of my knowledge. If you do not stretch yourself by working with more knowledgeable people from time to time, you don't develop. You may even go backwards. Prescott's Pickle Principle summarises this as: "Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered" or, put another way, "A small system that tries to change a big system through long and continued contact is more likely to be changed itself" (from Jerry Weinberg's excellent Secrets of Consulting book) Much as I hate to admit it, I am that "small system". So it is healthy and fun to occasionally sit down with like-minded people, and re-baseline your knowledge. That is exactly what I did the other Saturday. I survived a dull and freezing Wimbledon to attend Jason Gorman's " Intensive TDD Workshop " (the one-day super-intensive version of this one ). I won't go i...

I stumbled across a blog post about Scrum's origins on Jeff Sutherland 's blog recently. The whole thing is worth a read in order to get a perspective on where the methodology came from, but especially interesting was the following comment: " Few implementations of Scrum achieve the hyperproductive state for which Scrum was designed (5-10 times normal performance). Those that do all implement variations on XP engineering practices... " This fits with my - and others' - experience over the past few years. Scrum, with a few tweaks based on personal experience, provides a good starting point for a lightweight management framework. But that's just it - it's a management framework. You need wrap something to be managed in it. And if that something is a lardy, slow mini-waterfall process then you will simply end up delivering stale garbage more efficiently. XP has the opposite problem. It provides tools and techniques to develop quality software efficiently, bu...