Agile Otter Blog

I want to introduce you all to a term: Cowards' Confrontation: a rule made in order to avoid having an uncomfortable conversation with an individual, which rule is either selectively relevant or selectively reinforced (or both). So, for instance, a 15-person team exists of which only two people ever eat at their desks. One has a cold sandwich and carrot sticks, but the other brings tuna and shrimp freshly heated from the cafeteria's microwave oven.  The team has been bothered by the fragrance of the daily seafood and the residue left in the trash can. The team (or a manager at the team's request) makes a rule that there will be no eating in the workspace. Our sandwich-eater ignores the policy with impunity. After all, this person knows that the policy was about smelly seafood and doesn't apply to them. Nobody, team member or manager, says anything. The seafood-eater notices the sandwich-eater's scofflaw behavior and returns to their desk with food one da...

You can't handle it! In 2018 or 2019, I was introduced to the idea of hyper-rationality. I think it was under another name (to be given shortly) and as part of a presentation by George Dinwiddie on, of all things, estimation. It was a funny place to be introduced to ideas from psychology and family therapy, as well as organizational psychology and collaboration, but there it is. It is nice to be smart. It's extra nice to be right. It is wonderfully nice to be right, smart, rational, and helpful to others. Sometimes we put too much emphasis on being right and forget to be helpful. Hyper-rationality is a state of being excessively or inordinately rational. It is a belief in rational truth as an unassailable fortress, that being correct is all that matters. For instance, consider the sentiment that if I am right or I am telling the truth  then you have no right to be offended or upset. It might feel right, but it sounds wrong. When people are acting hyper-ra...

In the last installment  we talked about communication between managers and employees, efficiency notions, and other key continuous improvement ideas. This installment let's pick up on the idea of doing great work quickly. A: You have said several times that something has to change for work to be done faster. Skills and stuff to make the work easier. Is that the right way? B:  If and only if  the bottleneck is actually in development, it will help. There is some good material here from A. In fact, skills and tools and knowledge can make the work progress faster. A developer with deep knowledge of their tools and stack can get work done in a tiny fraction of the time it takes a less knowledgable developer to figure out how to get a result. This is often misinterpreted as "a 10x developer" but really it's a 1x developer surrounded by other 1x people who just don't know the stack, the code base, or the tools as well. If you like a 10x devs, invest in hel...

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...