Agile, a poem
Agile is a Journey
I thought I'd have a little blast at poetry for fun...
Agile is not a Gift I can Give,
Nor is it a Method I can Teach,
It is a Choice You must willingly Take,
And a Journey You are willing to Make.The road Never ends,
It Twists and it Turns,
But the Road is your Road,
And it's your Trail which Blazes.Don't be a Passenger,
Don't pay a Chauffeur,
Grab hold of the wheel,
And Pick your own Pace.Take those Detours,
Enjoy the Delights,
Splash in the Fountains,
Chase those Green Lights.
Updated – Agile Hitler – He’s Using Git
It's been a few years since Hitler found agile , so it's nice to see that Hitler is now enjoying git...
Ten Commandments of Agile
I've posted a few entries now about my unease with the fuzziness surrounding Agile and how I feel it needs some clarity so I thought I'd have a quick stab at it.
The following commandments would be my first stab at such a list which would apply to any person who is part of or interacts with an Agile team.
- Thou shalt not negotiate quality
- Thou shalt not prophesize without proof
- Thou shalt not falsify the facts
- Thou shalt not force thy wishes on others
- Thou shalt not discourage those around you
- Thou shalt not disparage the actions of others
- Thou shalt not work without committment
- Thou shalt not focus on more than a singular item
- Thou shalt not demonstrate incomplete work
- Thou shalt not act in isolation
Of course, this is just a bit of fun on my part, but I fail to see why there can't be a set of golden rules of Agile? This is also a very quick list, so who knows, I may revisit this at some time to refine it...
Also, please note, I'm not being remotely fuzzy about this... I'm not saying
"I value not negotiating quality over allowing any old crap in the code..."
Big Red Button
Here's my little user story:
As a blogger,
I want to use Threely as my url shortener.
So that I get more letters on Twitter.
Pretty simple story, and also very simple to implement, but impossible to test? I can certainly test the API to twitter, but given I use a wordpress plugin (developed by someone else) to do the auto-posting is it worth the effort for the addition of 6 lines of code?
For me, the pragmatic solution is to take the risk based approach. I'm going live with Threely (http://3.ly) (again, fixed a small typo), but have an escape plan (extremely important when there are known risks) which is the ability to revert if anything untowards happens and revisit my approach.
So, here goes, pressing the big red button 🙂
Delivering Early
The MMF wasn't quite complete.
I've seen plenty of fancy graphs demonstrating how agile provides faster ROI through early delivery and while this can certainly be true in some cases, it doesn't necessarily hold true for all cases.
Just because a feature is done, doesn't mean you could, or even should deliver it... The Minimal Marketable Feature set (MMF) is very important for determining when to go live. When you take the MMF into account, then agile doesn't deliver any value until the MMF is complete and this certainly won't be within the first iteration.
Of course, once the MMF is done, agile will win hands down delivering new functionality, enhancements and bug fixes (what bugs?)...
So what went wrong in the picture? What was the MMF
- Wheels/Chassis
- Engine/Gearbox
- Steering
- A Seat
And guess what, they've ticked all the boxes, I'm so excited I'm going to run off now to my local dealership and snap one up...