Archive for the ‘Agility’ Category

Convincing/evangelizing is a turn off, so what’s the key ?

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

I came across this interesting article about agile evangelism (thanks to Mathieu for sharing the link).

The conclusion of the post is that if you insist too much and try to convince others that your way of doing something [in this case, agile] is superior to their way of doing the same thing, you end up being seen as a freak. So his conclusion is to let people “learn from themselves”. So, in this scenario, I guess darwinism will then help determine the best alternative, as the inferior solutions will eventually die. awesome !

Now, let’s say you have some kind of interest in the success of the projects (involved in the project, somehow)  using an “inferior” solution that you consider threatening for the project.  What are your options ? The ones I see are :

  • Debate forever in the hope that the others will rally in favor of your solution. In his article, Grant Joung seems to think it’s just making things worse, and I can understand that religious debates do not lead anywhere, as nobody is likely to rally (have you ever seen a muslim convert to Judaism just because someone made a point against  islam during a debate ??)
  • If a few others also support your solution, and depending on whether it’s worth it, you can always attempt a putch on the project and just let the unsatisfied people go away, and end up dealing with those that agree with you
  • Quit (which ends up being the same solution as Grant Joung suggests). You definitely do not want to be part of something that you know will fail

Hmm.. It looks like none of the options I see is ideal… Does anyone have a suggestion ?

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Nobody’s interested in “agility”

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Very nice post from Martin proulx called Personne n’est interessé par l’agilité. (french)
Something that I would add to his article is that programmers themselves are NOT INTERESTED in agility, really !

For the sake of explaining my point, let’s consider two types of developers :

  • Joe the programmer, who doesn’t care about code quality
  • Scott, the more advanced developer, who works as hard as possible to produce good code quality

It’s pretty easy to realize that Joe doesn’t care about agility, scrum, and whatever, as he just works on whatever his hierarchy wants him to work on. Give him scrum, give him waterfall, he just won’t see a difference anyways. Code is about copy-pasting, and google is your friend !

Now, let’s see the case of Scott, the “elite” developer. He wants to focus on code. He likes code, he dreams about code, he wants to refactor, and he will do anything that allows him to produce better code. And usually, he just _hates_ politics. When Scott first heard of agility, what he thought was “yeahhhhhhh great!!! FINALLY something that allows me to just focus on my code”. yeah.. that was a few years ago.

That was true, at least for some time, because agility used to be about good developers trying to find a way to just work.

But now, things have changed. Agile is nearly mainstream, and most developers who claim they do agile development are just instances of Joe() who learnt how to create crappy, unmaintainable tests. The good developers have already moved to the latest bleeding edge methodology which is called “Common Sense Politic-Less Programming (CSPLP)“.  That’s what allows them to get away from the religious debates brought by the scrum and agile masses. (they prefer technical religious debates.. but that’s another problem.. ;-) )
Once again, what they want is to produce code, not  debate forever about “how long should a daily scrum last”, “what kind of clown tricks could we do to build a better team”, or “how to teach the monkeys how to produce good code without affecting their ego “. Have you heard of google developers applying Scrum ? Have you heard of Linus torvalds bringing agile to improve Linux ? All of them just don’t care, because they already produce good, working software, that they release iteratively. And they did not need agile for that, they had their skills, and their common sense. It’s the developers who are producing the code, not the methodology ! And the successful companies have understood one thing : “if you hire the good guys, you’re gonna make great things”. It’s as simple as that.
To put it in a nutshell, nobody cares about agile and scrum. While the average joe doesn’t care or hasn’t even heard about it, the elite scott is skilled-enough to apply the CSPLP methodology, which stands for Common Sense Politics-Less Programming.

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