Agile Otter Blog

We recently started talking about Taking Agile Back . I was surprised to hear how much response came from this. Now we have a community on google and presence on linked in and yahoo groups and twitter . People are coming from the woodwork to say that they're also sad about the state of agile practice and they either yearn to return to agile values, or they lament that they never were able to enjoy really practicing those values. But what do we do? I think that there are at least three immediate steps we can take. Remove barnacles Reinstate values Move forward Remove Barnacles The first is a tad negative. We should call out the things that have grown on the skin of agile (shallow, peripheral issues) and have obscured the heart of the principles.  I've already addressed some of the noise that has grown up around velocity and estimation . I've been suppressing a number of opinions on metrics and disengagement.  You can love or hate Linked-In, but ...

Note: this was originally all plain text and a little shorter.  As more people have joined the conversation, and other supportive materials have come to mind, it is growing links and a little verbiage but this is only to support the idea: we don't have to settle for expediently cranking out horrible work between pointless meetings. We can do better.  Are we getting tired of the kind of "agile" where you don't really have any particular technical practices, change (and improvement) is entirely optional, and you pretty much do waterfall with additional overhead of meetings? Are we tired of seeing "sprints" and "iterations" used as ways to pressure people into working harder and longer (" pushing velocity "), with no training or learning or even autonomy? Are n-week death marches the ultimate expression of our values? Are we tired of the kind of "agile" that's all about buzzword compliance and rituals and motivationa...

David Gray wrote a great article in a funny place, as a comment to a really great YouTube video.    I took it upon myself to reproduce it here because you need to read it and I do too. Dividing work. Division of labor, as Adam Smith pointed out in the 1700s, has the potential to increase productivity. But division of labor also leads to interdependency: every worker relies more heavily on others to do her job, and as the number of handoffs increases, so does the potential for dropped balls. As the number of divisions grows, so grows the interdependence.   This interdependence creates a need to synchronize and coordinate the work. Traditionally this has been the job of management and bureaucracy. We coordinate the work through measurement and control.   As you increase the number of divisions, you also increase complexity. One of the goals of these divided and interdependent systems is making work more efficient and systems more consistent, predictable an...