Agile Otter Blog

People say that agile is “just common sense.”  I wish. I mean, it’s well-precedented and everything makes sense. But there is nothing common about it.  It’s still a counter-cultural and counter-intuitive movement, to such an extent that most companies can’t tolerate it and have to compromise and cripple it immediately, even during adoption. Often before adoption. Two problems with the “common sense” label: It’s not common at all.  It’s unpalatably sensible. Just the simple idea of forming teams with all the skills necessary to do the job — that’s so uncommon as to earn an “uncommonly sensible” label.   The idea of management “providing the environment and support they need” seems so backward to many companies as to be unthinkable (literally — they can’t think this way).  And let’s not even try to penetrate with the idea of producing code that works every week, instead of (traditionally) code that may work someday when all the...

A lot of people's first brush with Agile is during Scrum training.  There is usually some mention of the Agile Manifesto  and its 12 Principles , maybe even 10 or 20 minutes spent comparing these to the scrum principles and behaviors.  For a lot of these people, it's the first time they have ever read, seen, or heard of the agile manifesto. If we are really lucky, they might even have heard of the Modern Agile principles. That's pretty cool when it happens.   But they heard them in the context of Scrum, so they assume that these are supporting documents and of course when they're told "Scrum is Agile" they misunderstand. The instructor probably meant to say "Scrum done right is fully compliant with Agile Principles and is a fully agile framework" (which I'm not arguing here).  Unfortunately, most people hear that as the identity function "Agile is another word meaning Scrum. Scrum IS Agile. Agile IS scrum. They mean ex...

From my point of view and involvement with #NoEstimates we consider the things where the price is unknowable and the desire to know the price interferes with our ability to make good decisions. 9:33 AM · Aug 23, 2019 · Twitter for iPhone 3 Likes Tim "Agile Otter" Ottinger @tottinge · 1h Replying to @WoodyZuill @duarte_vasco and 6 others An interesting question to ask: how much will payroll cost when it's all done? You know, eventually in the long run what will be the total lifetime cost of having employees and paying taxes? We make decisions about hiring and benefits without knowing what the end total will be. 1 1 Tim "Agile Otter" Ottinger @tottinge · 1h Likewise, how much will y...