Agile Otter Blog

I feel safe to say that "being agile" is more than a mere state of mind, because an agile person or team has definite practices and tendencies that are not present in non-agile environments. I don't doubt that there is a change in values, but I argue that those changes will have practical, daily results that can be seen. Too many people hear/see "just a mindset" and think of the four tiny sentences in the front page of the manifesto (which skips over the first paragraph, which is by far the more important IMHO). To wit:  A team is working 80+ hours a week.   The design and architecture were carved in stone last year.   The members all "do their own work."   Each team member has 18 tasks "in process"   They're "debugging their way to release" without automation   The last five retros have ended with "oh, well. We'll try to do better, I guess."   They are all competing against each other for recognition/award...

An i nteresting article from Sara Mednick linked insight and sleep, but in her explanation on page 27 I saw some interesting echoes of the work done in 1920s by Graham Wallas. This is an excerpt from the paper linked above (emphasis mine): The insight gain studied by Wagner et al. initially revealed itself in an implicit manner.  Then, through a slow process (enhanced by sleep), it emerged from the nondeclarative into the declar- ative realms as a fully assembled insight into the task structure.  The authors proposed that insight gain is not a pro- cedural learning process, since the reac- tion time data did not become faster with learning, which is the hallmark of procedural learning.  Instead, all participants who gained insight (regardless of whether they were in the sleep or wake groups) actually showed a slowing in reaction time just prior to insight gain compared with participants who did not gain insight.   “Specifically, the slow- ing of reaction...