Agile Otter Blog

Over at Reddit  there is a discussion about my Stop Per-Person Swimlanes article at Industrial Logic . This surfaced what seems to be a common misunderstanding. Some people think that the board was designed to facilitate public shaming. It's to motivate members in a team to work harder. When your personal progress and responsibilities are put on a clearly visible chart somewhere it's a bit different than a sea of todo's some of which are labeled with your name.  There are a lot of answers, agreeing or disagreeing (mostly disagreeing).  This one stands out: It's different. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing is EXTREMELY unclear.   My take is that in most corporate environments that is a BAD thing. Why? Because, rather than thinking about the overall health of the code, coder's main concern is getting that ticket closed [emphasis mine - tro] .   Which is a very straight path to the quick codebase degradation.   Meanwhile, your v...

Gathered answers:  A for-profit concern. Involving strangers (you can't know and care about 5000 people individually) Using low-cost "resources" Involving huge budgets Pyramiding Multisite, with considerable offshore work Having a long-entrenched industrial-age culture Using fungible "resources" so staffing can be "re-balanced" easily Having strong central control (seeming necessary when working with strangers?) Having many teams contributing parts which share an architecture Having many interdependent projects, with independent teams Having a strong identity/culture ("unchangeable self" fallacy) Having promises outstanding in the form of multiyear "roadmaps"  Essentially waterfall view of software  Law of 2nd floor -- nobody 2 levels above or below you knows what you really do for a living. Essentially addicted to using brute force (large numbers) to solve problems. Having complicated budgeting processes with...