I’m at Scott Ambler’s session on Agile methodology. It’s quite
\ngood. Once the audio of it gets online, I highly recommend all you
\nfolks using Agile in large organizations look at. The message is this:
\nchances are, you could be doing a lot better, and your people probably
\ndon’t want to or don’t know how to tell you that.<\/p>\n
The first thing about Ambler, is that he uses the word “stupid” all
\nthe time. There’s nothing wrong with that: there’s a lot of that going
\non in software development, and we as a community need to be more
\nvocal and repetitive at pointing it out, hopefully to people who
\naren’t already in the choir.<\/p>\n
The presentation essentially lays out a method of evaluating the
\npractices in software development, each time asking the question,
\n“does what you’re doing help you shift software? If not, stop doing
\nit.”<\/p>\n
For example, he said that when he goes to visit teams, he asks them
\nthese two questions:<\/p>\n
Chances are, the teams at most large shops couldn’t answer those
\nquestions effectively, esp. the second. In fact, I would argue that
\nstake-holder management and process is the weak length in Enterprise
\nAgile. Product management is extremely difficult and much more different
\nwhen you’re an Agile organization.<\/p>\n
When you look at Scrum, for example, the role of product owner is
\nthe single point of requirements and product decisions. That’s the
\nideal, of course. Typically, these roles aren’t filled by people who
\nare technical enough to direct the feature set of software. Someone
\nstood up and asks Scott, “but the marketing people don’t know to add
\nfeatures like scalability, clustering, and other technical things, so
\nhow does this work?”<\/p>\n
And in what’s been the typical line from Scott, he said, “sure,
\nyou’ve got to make sure your stockholders are smart people. If you’re
\nstupid, you’ll get burned. Welcome to software development.”<\/p>\n
In addition to laying out simple ways to evaluate the effectiveness
\nof a teams development practices, he presents several practices and
\nmuscly rhetoric for each (you can go look up the academic arguments
\nlater if you want).<\/p>\n
For example, he’s quite big on pair programming. He says, “If your
\nmanager is preventing you from doing pair programming, figure out how
\nto make him get to go fetch you a cup of coffee or do something
\nuseful.”<\/p>\n
Here are some good quotes and points:<\/p>\n
Disclaimer:<\/b> Sun and IBM are clients.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Technorati Tags: agile<\/a>, conferences<\/a>, javaone<\/a>, javaone2006<\/a>, programming<\/a>, projectmanagement<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m at Scott Ambler’s session on Agile methodology. It’s quite good. Once the audio of it gets online, I highly recommend all you folks using Agile in large organizations look at. The message is this: chances are, you could be doing a lot better, and your people probably don’t want to or don’t know how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile","category-conferences"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}