Posts tagged with "agile"

The other day my friend Aslam Khan wrote a post on Facebook about a talk he had held at Agile Africa 2018, and he wrote that this might be his “farewell to the agile community”

This resonated with me, since I’ve long felt that agile is no longer where I want to be. As much as I still believe in the original premise of agile and like teaching people how to think about undeterministic processes, most companies these days are looking for improvement without doing any meaningful change. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised as fifteen years ago agile was still an early adopter business, these days we’re dealing with the late majority and laggards trying to adopt some version of “scaled” agile.

It was 1979 and the punk movement wasn’t going anywhere. The music was loud, the hairdos were spiky and a majority of the older generation really didn’t get what was happening.

In order to bring some order to the chaos, Swedish state television, the only one allowed at the time, decided to do a televised concert with what’s now punk legends Ebba Grön.

While the kids ran a mosh pit on the floor, older people were seated in stands behind. When the music was over a journalist asked the older people, “So, what did you think of this”. It was a weird time.

Recently I was replying to a post on the Valtech intranet, and tried coming up with a word for what I do as an agile coach. The thing that popped up in my mind was agile smurfing, which I think nails it. As an agile coach I do everything between teaching TDD to solving organizational issues, and since you can exchange every word in the smurf language to “smurf” it just works.

I published a new blog post today over at Valtech Labs in Swedish about the difference between the swedish words “agile” and “nimble” (lättrörlig). In short, while they once meant the same thing, agile has lost a lot of its meaning. Instead of trying to change things back, we should let agile mean whatever people think it means, and use a more descriptive word, like nimble, to describe the process we once called agile. Which of course means XP :).

I am in Oslo for Smidig 2011, where I gave a talk titled “Layers of complexity”. It centers around medium number systems and Cynefin framework in order to provide a model for software development and explain why we cannot use time based measurements in order to improve the process. It also mentions why time estimates are never correct.

Later today at 18:00 I will give my talk on Taylorism and Mass Production at Oslo XP Meetup. Hope to see you there.

Today at Smidig 2010 I sponsored an Open Space session on the topic “How and When did Agile System Development Stop Being About System Development”

We had a very good discussion, and these are the notes we managed to gather, in the order they were discussed:

• It’s Scrums fault
• It’s easier to sell with soft skills arguments
• Agile is trying to sell into other fields where the technical practices don’t apply.
• Obsolete knowledge in management, old Cobol programmers not up to date with todays technologies.
• As people speak more at conferences, the less they program.
• More attention to people who are good at talking, and devs normally aren’t.
• Using wrong metaphors, i.e. factory, to explain process to managers who do not understand leads to wrong process.
• Recipient of system development does not understand the problem of why engineering practices are important.
• Soft skills are easier to acquire.
• Average organizations have average employees. Does not want to take responsibility, not that interested.
• Management who does not understand the process they are running.
  • Is this partly developers fault?

Thanks all who joined in!

ThoughtWorks will give two free seminars at Berns Tuesday April 21 2009.

The morning one is given by me and will be on the business value of agile and lean, and how it can be the competitive advantage in difficult times.

In the afternoon my colleague Zack Exley will give a behind-the-scenes look at the technological side of the Barack Obama campaign.

Both of the talks will be kicked off by our chairman Roy Singham who will give his view on why he believes Scandinavia has a great future in the software development world.

Peter Krantz sent this clip from a Capoeira fight (rating: violent) which I see as a really good analogy for XP’s YAGNI and the simplest thing that could possibly work.

This Saturdays edition of Dagens Industri had a really interesting column by Jan Åman, former curator of Färgfabriken. He writes about how you can either move forward or secure your back, and how the world is run by people watching their backs and making sure that decisions can never be questioned.

It is very close my favorite XP slogan “playing to win” and what I talk about in my presentation on Agile Documentation. A good read, but unfortunately only in the paper edition.

The Agile Sweden annual christmas party is on Thursday at the Agical office. The evening will kick off with a few lightning talks, of which I am doing one. My talk is titled “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work” and will discuss how XP’s value of simplicity has more or less been forgotten as agile has gone mainstream.