Agile Otter Blog

Being remote is a bit of a compromise. This is not my first time to reflect on the issues , but this one might be helpful and the topic stays fresh for me.  As a full-time remote I suffered through many issues, including: bad conference calling systems frequent drops bad phone service sometimes iffy internet and screen sharing  switching from broadband to cell phone for internet connectivity ISP downtimes lag (omg lag!) time zones (we were in India, Illinois, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Iowa. My current company is in Amsterdam, Brazil, East Coast, Midwest, Texas, West Coast -- and we have satellites & customers in India, UK, Russia, UAE, New Zealand, and China among others) unavailability when people were in emergency meetings onsite that I didn't know about being outside of the social conversations being unaware of the mood at the office missing gossip that everyone else took for granted other people not seeing/appreciating what life was like on my end ...

Take a trip with me for a minute. Imagine that today you decided to shoplift.  If you are like me, that thought makes you edgy and nervous. If you are not like me, you can consider it with no feeling of discomfort at all. If you are a regular shoplifter, it might even give you a bit of a thrill. It makes me feel bad. Why? My great-nephew lived with me for a while. He believed that if he felt bad, it was incumbent upon everyone else to placate him. He would stage elaborate tantrums, public meltdowns, and crying fits. Creating feelings of guilt or shame in others was his reliable strategy. He was nine years old and never had to do anything he didn't want to do, or eat anything he didn't want to eat (at 9, he had never eaten a sandwich, soup, or vegetable until the 9 months he lived with us). Certainly, the kind of guilt that my relative used was a self-serving, manipulative, control strategy. It's not uncommon. I have known adults well into their sixties who wer...

This is not a manifesto. It looks a lot like a rather famous manifesto (the middle of it anyway) but it is not a manifesto. This is just a set of principles that I've successfully applied in numerous personal and professional settings, always with good effect. Pull  is a better flow than Push Continuous is more competent than Batch Agreements are more negotiable than Orders Brains per Task  is more efficient than Tasks per Person Improvement is a better goal than Compliance Fail Now is cheaper than Fail Later Simplicity works better than Discipline Safety is best May they serve you as well as they have served me so far. Peace.

I'm not a big scrum promoter, but I am VERY familiar with scrum and have coached many teams and always been able to improve their success with the method to some extent. I've taught scrum. I don't have to love scrum (not more than XP for certain!) to see that it's getting a bad rap. Ignoring advice to "never blog angry" I'm going to let the grumpy old man out for a minute, in hopes you'll hear what he has to say.  Suggestion:  Before railing on how scrum doesn't work  you should be sure that what you're doing is scrum. Some people say they're doing scrum because they have planning meetings, morning status meetings, and sometimes have reviews or retrospectives. But they're not sure why they're doing them, and these meetings just take time away from what would otherwise be potentially productive programming and testing time. So, let's get back to the basics here. Scrum is entirely based on transparency , inspection , a...