Pragmatic Agilist

If the Agile Founding Fathers had written a Manifesto about US NASA Space Shuttle trips to the International Space Station, it might have read, in part, "we have come to value the safe delivery of astronauts, space station parts, and experimental moss, gerbils, and other stuff to the space station over creating a dignified-looking Saturn 5 rocket." http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/Endeavor%20Docking%20525.jpg As the years passed, if we had all found ourselves employed at NASA in the shuttle program rather than in the IT organizations in small businesses and big insurance companies, our artifacts, processes, people, and procedures might have played the following roles: How we think user stories fit into software development, as described by the ISS analogy: The role of "the shuttle" would have been played by our overall defined software development lifecycle (SDLC) -- the process supports delivery of the payload. ...

You probably think it's simple.  Your boss wants "good news."  The way it will work is three steps: You will do "a good job" at your job You will tell your boss They will reward you "Brotherhood of Man" from "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," http://armchairactorvist.blogspot.com/2011/06/friday-dance-party-attention-every.html And yet one day, something goes wrong.  "Something bad" happens, or, worse, you "make a mistake."  Or maybe over a few weeks or months, you do some stuff and then one day you realize you have "been a major idiot," and "something bad" is going to happen.  The world is full of unpleasant cocktails of "something bad" and "making a mistake."  And let me also note that "you just got dealt a losing hand" can happen to you, and maybe it takes you a while to figure it out.  Maybe your choices are among alternatives which are all ba...

Did you know... From http://www.encroach.net/info/chicago_fire_spinning/poi_sacred_geometry/sacred_geometry_nature_images.html That is all.

In 2004, Thomas Friedman famously argued that in the age of "Globalization 3.0," The World is Flat , by which he seems to have meant that with current technology, big companies can shop all over the world for the cheapest and best laborers, rather than building local teams.  The book brought the issue to the attention of the general public, particularly in the US, and spawned a big discussion, including this entertainingly polemical review from Matt Taibbi .  Instructions for making your own flat globe are available here:  http://makingmaps.net/2007/09/19/making-flat-earth-globes/ Whatever you think of Friedman or Tiabbi, software development people can tell you that indeed, the modern "enterprise" team will most certainly include participants from some assortment of Western countries as well as some subset of the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), or maybe new players like Vietnam or the Philippines.  Distributed software development is the norm ...

Are you tired of being lectured by "Pure Scrum" fanatics?  Some people are so quick to judge!  They will tell you "that's not agile!" or "that's a smell!" when: you have a defined Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) team members are distributed to different rooms, cities, or time zones you write anything down on paper larger than a 3x5 card you spend more than a few days planning your work, even for a large project you don't release to production at the end of every sprint you start requirements an iteration ahead of development you have a management structure more than one level deep you use MS Project to do resource planning you work on fixed cost projects you have a PMP certification on your resume (even if it's the PMI-ACP ) you advocate use of HP Quality Center, which is Kryptonite to legions of agilists world-wide you perform end-of-year performance reviews Agile friends, let's take a look at ourselves.  Am I ri...

I've been avidly following a discussion in the LinkedIn "Agile and Lean Software Development Group" called " Does Agile mind-set suggest any method for measuring the individual performance of developers and using it in a punish and reward system? :  (I included the url, but I'm not sure what will happen if you try to point your browser at it if you're not me.). From http://memegenerator.net/instance/25931448 There are a lot of interesting directions for this topic to take, but the key question I've been mulling over in my own mind is this:  What, if anything, do you need to do as a hiring manager at "annual review time," in order to reinforce an agile culture of teamwork without demotivating your star contributors?   It's Star Trek's notion that the needs of the many must battle and win against the needs of the few!  Or so it seems. Let's talk about these issues frankly for a moment. Punish and reward :   a significant p...

Experienced agilists make it sound so easy, don't they?  They tell you over beers about the big, honking project they did last time.  They showed up, did some "workshopping," set up a little CI environment, and then, two weeks later, they began churning out working software.  And not just any working software:  high quality, low complexity, and perfect fit to business needs.  And why not?  The Product Owner was in the room to design and approve it!  Agile is fun!  Woo hoo! This may not sound like the projects you do at all, where you experience confusion, resistance, fear, sweat, and tears, and you teeter daily on the edge of failure, public humiliation, alcoholism, and unwilling participation in corporate "resource efficiency" efforts.   How can you be an agilist when you don't share this ability to triumph over the grim corporate realities and do the impossible every day (twice on Sunday?) http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sh...