Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

If you think you're beaten, then you are. I have recently been involved with a team where key players spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to identify reasons why we shouldn't try things. Working with people like this drags down the entire Team. It lowers morale because it becomes harder to make the changes that energise the working environment. The Team knows that it can never get better because the naysayers will do their best to block change and maintain the status quo . If only people would spend time and energy actually fixing the problems instead of finding reasons to justify substandard tools, processes, practices and behaviours.

An interesting truism from XP Day's final session, Have We Lost our Mojo : "Agile is a brand." If it is, then it must have some kind of value. Therefore it is worth protecting from second rate imitations.

A bug does not definitely exist or not until you exercise the code. You can either let your users find it, or you can write tests to flush it out. It's your call.

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...

Finally.... I have finished a full suit of Thirsty Bear Software Planning Poker cards: OK, it's still a prototype built from laminated pouches, inkjet printouts and a lot of patience, but they make a huge difference to the flow of a Planning Game. Even using a small subset (0, 1, 2, 3 and '?') has a significant impact by removing the "follow the leader" behaviour that conventional planning encourages. Now to find a printer that can supply a small run as "real" playing cards.....

I think I might have stumbled upon a better name for what I was originally calling " faux agile ". " Cargo Cult Agile " seems to convey the sentiment far better by linking it to the cargo cult religions around the world. In short, it's when a team/organisation blindly adopts agile practices without really understanding them in order to get benefit from them. I picked it up from an XP Day session description , but it has appeared elsewhere as well (drop me a line if you believe you invented the term, and I will attribute the source). I only wish I had thought of it.....

An interesting insight into continuous learning and improvement from Brian Marick: "At the end of each iteration, each team member should be able to say why she is worth more money to her employer than she was at the beginning ." Can you put your hand on your heart and say that you are improving yourself every two weeks? It's certainly something to aspire to.