Agile Otter Blog

This is a mostly-verbatim post from a LinkedIn forum.  I thought it was worth sharing with the audience here, so you can help me refine my thinking. In the forum, another member suggested that agile and waterfall are opposite ends of a spectrum. He further suggested that a team can choose its own position along the "sliding scale" between the two extremes.  This is when it dawned on me that maybe I understand why this is not true.  Please pipe in with your insights, extensions, or corrections. It is possible that agile and waterfall are not two approaches to the same thing. If they were two approaches to the same thing, I think mixing them would make sense and the sliding scale makes sense. If, however, they are two different systems with different axiomatic bases, then the reasoning that is productive in the one will be surprisingly counter-productive in puzzling ways in the other. I suggest that the systems are axiomatically different. Agile values c...

Bridging two worlds is not easy. See if you can spot the non-agile assumptions in all of these questions: You find one team is only meeting schedules and pleasing customers because they have been padding schedules and cutting scope. How can you get them to plan and execute more aggressively?  One of your teams is hogging some of the QA resources full-time, and have been since the start of the project. How do you ensure you'll have a full complement of testers for your other team's testing phase?  One of your teams has stopped turning in estimates and long-range plans. They seem to be producing well enough, but how do you reign in their manager without hurting productivity?  Of your two teams, one group works overtime and weekends but the other refuses to stay late even during mid-week days. You have many projects in the pipeline. How do motivate those clock-watchers?  Your team has severe technical problems, but instead of keeping their nose to the grindstone,...