I’m Agile, But!
Stop right there...
You're not agile...
There are no buts in agile...
If something is wrong, you change it, you don't say "but"...
If you truly can't change it, then you're truly not agile either.
To be agile doesn't mean you must follow any particular methodology, to be truly agile you must be actively seeking to constantly improve every aspect of what you do. If this involves trying out some lean principles to eliminate waste, or TDD to improve the quality of the tests, it doesn't matter.
I'm a strong believer that agile has now become synonymous with many of the methodologies, which is very sad since agile is so much more than a methodology, it's a culture...
So, the next time you hear yourself saying I'm agile, but... You've just identified the next problem to solve in your own methodology and your also just a little bit more agile than you already were...
Too Many Broths Spoil The Cook
I' ve got several things bubbling over at the moment and because I never bothered capturing them as stories and placing them in a backlog I'm really struggling to make headway with any of them. Some are personal experimentation, others are professional and finally there's a few projects which may end up as open source.
So what's stopping me making this backlog? It's the lack of a single coherent customer to do the prioritisation of course. I could certainly pull out all the things I want to do into a set of stories, but would it be right for me to also play the customer role? I certainly don't want to ask my work to do the prioritisation, since I know which side of the fence they'll lean on...
I think my personal challenge is quite similar to many projects I have witnessed where there has not been a single customer. It becomes extremely difficult to prioritise stories and deliver a single useful end to end feature and instead we deliver lots of little bits and pieces. Of course, switching contexts in itself is extremely expensive in terms of productivity, but unless there is a single customer, with clear goals and a solid backlog of well expressed stories then switching contexts is inevitable.
What do I plan to do? Well first and foremost I'm going to take the baby-step of at least creating my backlog of stories... By definition, these are my stories, so in reality I am the customer, I guess I'm just like all other customers, I'm not a very good one and I like to keep changing my mind - oh well...
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...
Simple isn’t Easy
After 2 days coaching on test first development within a legacy code-base (lots and lots of refactoring) it really hit home just how difficult it can be to do something simple. The English language doesn't help, because simple implies it should be easy, but in reality simplicity is extremely challenging. I suspect this holds true in many fields (physics springs to mind, how long did it take for e=mc²).
I'm left wondering whether it is something inherent in human nature that leads us to strive complexity or whether it is actually the way we are educated. Certainly, with regards to software engineering the majority of the agile techniques and practises appear to contradict what is being taught in universities. The comment I hear most often when coaching Test First Development is that the difficulty is in thinking backwards, suggesting that the practise itself isn't difficult per se, but it's the way we think that needs rewired.
Of course, not knowing what the problem is makes it difficult to formulate a solution - now there''s a real challenge for agile 
- Crackle and pop? There's a snap for that.
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