Agile Otter Blog

XP and Scrum and the agile methods are about delivering. Frequently. Sooner than that. More often. In order to do that, there had to be a lot of adjustment. You can read the wonderful XP books (explained, installed, etc) from Addison Wesley, and you can follow a lot of the reasoning on the c2 wiki (you know where/what that is, right?) They came up with a very simple system with almost no overhead compared to all the development "methods" or "methodologies" that preceded, and they delivered all the time. Of course XP is offered for free with full disclosure (even caveats!) for anyone who wants it. No certification, no official certifying body, just solid results. Of course, it languished while other orgs who can afford more marketing and franchising opportunities went large, and now it is making a comeback. XP practitioners were key signers of the Agile Manifesto , and I like to think that the manifesto values and principles are particularly descriptive o...

The goal is always to inspire, to sometimes ridicule the naysayers, to bolster confidence, what have you, and the form is fairly common: For years we were harangued by the nonsense story that bees can't really fly according to the laws of physics, but they do it anyway because they don't know they cant. The real story is  less inspirational. Bumblebees are not ignorance-powered. Probably neither is your team. These little pro-ignorance platitudes are so common and well-shared that I even hear people bragging about how little they understand what they do, and that they don't read or research or study or even try to keep up. Because, as you know, that's not really important; all you need is ignorance, inspiration, stack overflow, and a fat copy-paste buffer. Sigh. I offer this alternative inspirational nugget: I suspect that "ignorance + inspiration" is really not the surefire recipe for success that inspirational speakers and feckless back-patt...