Agile Otter Blog

Bridging two worlds is not easy. See if you can spot the non-agile assumptions in all of these questions: You find one team is only meeting schedules and pleasing customers because they have been padding schedules and cutting scope. How can you get them to plan and execute more aggressively?  One of your teams is hogging some of the QA resources full-time, and have been since the start of the project. How do you ensure you'll have a full complement of testers for your other team's testing phase?  One of your teams has stopped turning in estimates and long-range plans. They seem to be producing well enough, but how do you reign in their manager without hurting productivity?  Of your two teams, one group works overtime and weekends but the other refuses to stay late even during mid-week days. You have many projects in the pipeline. How do motivate those clock-watchers?  Your team has severe technical problems, but instead of keeping their nose to the grindstone,...

We all have a convenient form of Parkinson's law. "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." People have suggested many reasons for this: People with long schedules are less careful and have more errors to fix. Work seldom is given half-enough time, so it expands rather readily. The longer a project goes on, the more new ideas/features get incorporated into it. If a project goes on long enough, it is punished and slowed by having people added to it. People are lazy and will always slow their pace if not held to task. People are creative enough that they can always find a way to achieve a task faster when required to do so. People will continue polishing and improving the product indefinitely. "Art is never finished; only abandoned." - Da Vinci Of these, the one most commonly heard is the one about people being lazy.  I suppose it might possibly be true if you're painting walls and are being paid by-the-hour, or if...