Agile Otter Blog

What the heck does that mean? It's a simple statement of personal preferences, right?   "I like bananas more than lemons." "I think today I'd rather have tamales than gyros." What power could there possibly be in stating that you like some things more than other things? Heck, these things are not even opposites. Look at the first one -- don't processes and tools exist to help individuals interact? Try the second one -- what about "writing documentation" would keep software from working? Okay, the last two have some real conflict, but that's 1/2 of the preferences listed. What DOES it Mean? My reading of this document and interactions with some of the originators has long led me to believe that this is truly a powerful document.  It goes well beyond personal beliefs and preferences.  What I see listed in the four simple category statements is a powerful set of decision-making criteria. If left-side items and righ...

For all the 'take back agile" and "agile smagile" and "apologizing for agile" and all the other post-agilists and so-called post-agilists in the world, I give you Otter's law: Any methodology followed via obligation and knowledge-avoidance cannot produce positive change.  I've ranted about change gone wrong and methodologies followed badly and horrible oversales and undersales and all, but it comes down to otter's law ultimately. Too many companies have huge gains from using XP and Scrum and what-have-you. Too many others tried "the same thing" with entirely different results. Some teams are whole-heartedly into the whole agile thing, and they seem to have pretty good. Others don't seem very excited and don't get much out of it. Is it excitement that they need? I don't think so. I think that the lack of excitement and the lack of progress have the same root. I think it's a lack of profluence in agile-a...

We recently started talking about Taking Agile Back . I was surprised to hear how much response came from this. Now we have a community on google and presence on linked in and yahoo groups and twitter . People are coming from the woodwork to say that they're also sad about the state of agile practice and they either yearn to return to agile values, or they lament that they never were able to enjoy really practicing those values. But what do we do? I think that there are at least three immediate steps we can take. Remove barnacles Reinstate values Move forward Remove Barnacles The first is a tad negative. We should call out the things that have grown on the skin of agile (shallow, peripheral issues) and have obscured the heart of the principles.  I've already addressed some of the noise that has grown up around velocity and estimation . I've been suppressing a number of opinions on metrics and disengagement.  You can love or hate Linked-In, but ...

Note: this was originally all plain text and a little shorter.  As more people have joined the conversation, and other supportive materials have come to mind, it is growing links and a little verbiage but this is only to support the idea: we don't have to settle for expediently cranking out horrible work between pointless meetings. We can do better.  Are we getting tired of the kind of "agile" where you don't really have any particular technical practices, change (and improvement) is entirely optional, and you pretty much do waterfall with additional overhead of meetings? Are we tired of seeing "sprints" and "iterations" used as ways to pressure people into working harder and longer (" pushing velocity "), with no training or learning or even autonomy? Are n-week death marches the ultimate expression of our values? Are we tired of the kind of "agile" that's all about buzzword compliance and rituals and motivationa...