Could Agile Have Evolved?
DNA
I've been researching material to support an article on my company blog entitled "Agile Dictators" and it left me thinking about how Agile started in the first place.
The more I reflect on this, the more I am left feeling that Agile is actually a mutation in software development and this is one of the major reasons why Agile is so difficult to master. I'm wondering whether agile would ever naturally evolve in a small team left to their own devices and I simply can't envisage it. Of course, this will now remain an academic hypothesis since Agile has now stamped it's influence indelibly on the DNA of software development.
Software development as a craft suffers from unnecessary complexity and I fear that Agile, which initially thrived in simplifying (or removing) this complexity, is now becoming itself encompassed in unnecessary complexity. Despite agreeing with much of the sentiment of the software craftmanship manifesto I just can't bring myself to sign up to it yet. I struggle to see the benefit of more fuzzy aspirational statements and would prefer to see a clarity of vision and roadmap to achieving it.
Fundamentally Agile is fantastic, but sadly the passionate discussions, raging debates and conflicting methodologies don't clarify anything. If Agile doesn't clearly define itself soon I fear yet another mutation may take centre stage and Agile will end up being just a blip (albeit a very significant blip, where we gained sight) in the evolution of software development.
Love Wave, Hate Google
I've not tried wave, but I'm already loving it, I can see immediately how it addresses one of my wishes from a previous post... But I'm hating the wait. I had always looked to Google as a very pioneering company and certainly assumed they applied agile principles. However, I can't see how such an important disruptive technology like Google Wave has managed to stay behind closed doors for 2 years...
I've been working on a few internal projects for my company of late and this has involved working in a distributed fashion (yes, pairing by phone), and during some of these sessions I can immediately envisage the benefits of using Wave.
Surely there is at least one complete, tested feature they can roll out to production? My concern is there are still some fundamental challenges facing the team, and I would not be surprised to find it being concurrency issues, so as the potential end-user of this technology I'm going to make it clear, I don't particularly care about have multiple users editing the same document in real-time with transparent, asynchronous updating... Let me edit, commit, refresh, etc as a simple starting point... But whatever you do, let me do something before I find a simple alternative...
To find out more about wave, visit the wave site http://wave.google.com/, and especially watch the google I/O presentation...
Information Overload
The internet has now pervaded my life to such an extent I'm going to soon be looking to get a direct connection to my brain. But before I do, I'm in desperate need for a way to organise the constant, chaotic stream of information that is radiating from it...
Here's my list of basic requirements.
I want to be able to
- view all messages in a single application, regardless of source (rss, google reader, twitter, etc).
- post messages to any of the applications I use (twitter, blog, facebook, etc)
- Should also be able to post to multiple applications at once
- search and filter the content
- filtered messages, should still be available for future search/display
- use multiple platforms (phone, web, laptop, desktop) with them all kept in sync
- specify multiple ways of notifying me if anything relevant appears
- particularly important for mobile platforms
- switch between different modes (professional, private, meeting)
But MOST IMPORTANTLY
I DO NOT WANT TO:
- create YABA (yet another b****y account) to use yet another free online tool
- wait for hours while it downloads everything before I can view a single message
If anyone knows of such a tool, I'll be extremely happy to hear about it...
Emotional Agile – Weather Poker
Ever since I attended a session by Rachel Davies on Project Mapping at SPA 2005 I have been interested in simple ways to use emotions to engage teams. On a recent gig for exoftware I introduced weather poker at the end of the daily stand-ups as a way to measure the feelings of the team.
Weather Symbols from edupics
In essence, each member of the team was given cards with weather symbols ranging from thunder to sunny. We would then take a vote on what yesterday felt like and average out the results. A larger image was then made highly visible on our information radiator for all to see. Despite this being a small experiment, it did look like this was a very quick and effective way to allow the team to express how they were feeling. Indeed, the one day when the team decided to display the thunder symbol lead to an intense interest from the on-site customer.
If you would like to try this in your team, I have attached a pdf with the cards ready to print and laminate.
PDF: weather-poker
- Crackle and pop? There's a snap for that.
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