Agile Otter Blog

We need to explain our primary statement of benevolence, expressed as "make people awesome." This is intended to express that have an explicit goal of benefitting specific others with all of our work. I have had so many apologetic conversations (not as in "I'm sorry" but as in "apologetics") about the term, and it's been described in several articles (some well, some rather poorly). The message is singularly hard to express, at least in a form that fits on the sticker. Admittedly, it's 2017. Everyone is on high alert, and words trigger people in dozens of interesting ways. To date, the primary triggers are: "make people" - which tends to be heard as "coerce, demand, or force", where we intend it to be more along the lines of "make your visitors feel at home."  "awesome" - which tends to be heard as "valley girl talk", indicating the speaker is bubble-headed or shallow.   Th...

Once we had "lightweight methods" as a frequent topic of discussion. It's still the movement I pursue. Some innovators came through and invented radically different ways of working, usually through collaboration and teamwork. The idea of simplifying the workflow was met with much enthusiasm in some quarters and surprisingly hot disdain and outraged anger in others. Still, those practicing lightweight methods produced software quite well, so lightweight methods persevered.  Lightweight methods took the name "agile", which is a perfectly good name.  Even so, I'll not use it much here.  Lightweight methods pursue "the least process you can afford" at all times.  If you can afford less documentation, then cut some of the documentation out. If you can afford fewer queues and piles, then streamline your process.  If you can afford a cheaper alternative to approval cycles or big plans up front, by all means, use the faster cheaper alterna...