Agile Otter Blog

Today's topic isn't so much about agile or coaching, it's about abuse and abusers and the line between the good guys and the bad guys. Decrying Abuse It's amazing how often I come a person who argues that some person in authority is unfair to them or others, and should not be allowed to behave in such a way.  Sometimes, it's not really abuse, it's just inconvenience or a different vision on what should be done and feelings were hurt. Sometimes it's about one person steamrolling others to get his or her way, which is an abuse. Other times to seize or impose control rather than to align and work together, which is unfair and unkind, and probably a kind of abuse. Sometimes it is personal and vengeful or wrathful, and is true abuse. It is a human phenomenon (well documented here ) that people will sometimes misuse their power to mistreat people, even while providing a good face to their own bosses. This "kick down, kiss up" strategy works...

Thanks to George Dinwiddie and Mark Levinson and that marvel we call Twitter, your agile otter presents the worlds briefest summation of Agile: Do small things supremely well, and let them add up to large things. Use feedback to steer to the results you want. Defeat problems with teamwork. Maintain an even strain.

So here is a failure mode I finally had time to think about. I saw a version of this play out, but here's the basic idea: The Customer doesn't get as many stories as he'd like, so he pads the story with functionality that has a lot of leverage. Then when it's done, he can use it many different ways. This makes it a little hard to see the original user request in the fluff, but it does accomplish its original task (too). The story is too large, but it is pushed to development, and developers take it on by sending a few guys offline to work on it for weeks/months. In the meantime, a developer realizes that this feature is considered critical, so it has to be pushed. He has other features he would like to ship, but they're not related to this one. On the other hand, if he can sneak in some of his feature into this story, he is assured it will be released. This makes the story later, so there's more overtime, and it takes on more testing risk, but it's a g...