When your CIO thinks everything is fine, but you know it isn’t.

(How many times have we all seen this or experienced this situation?)

Agile allows everyone to win.

John the CIO thought everything was running smoothly, not perfectly but customers had stopped complaining and products were shipping on time for once. Re-org after re-org had finally brought some results. The developers/testers/project managers and business analysts were happy, or so he was told by the V.P. of Development to whom all departments reported. Everyone was solving problems and working together in the open and bright space. Disciplined process and structure were in place and demonstrated during executive and shareholder meetings using sharp power point presentations. Documentation, process and procedures were stored in shared repositories for all to see. More eloquent documentation you could not find.

Everyone agreed improvements needed to continue but the executive management team was elated. more »

I will not claim to be a religious individual, but an associate referred me to the Serenity Prayer - more commonly known as the Alcholics Anonymous prayer - as an effective mindset for a change agent. more »

I guess the most recent spamit was ‘that straw’. Some beltway bandit spending a lot of flash money to make it sound like they had ‘the answer’ for a mere $500 and your soul to some highly regarded, deeply entrenched, piece of BDUF tool. I do not doubt for a second they will be successful on this side of the chasm, because we all buy into the notion that if it is in a PowerPoint, then it must be true. What a line of preprocessed plant food comes out of those projectors these days. There was a time when the Agile community had stuff to say because everything that was talked about was based on experience not on flights of logical fantasy. Gee we even had a name for it - hmm how that go, Empirical versus Deductive analysis. more »

Of all the virtues within Agile software development, none are more important than the numerous means of receiving feedback layered into the entire Agile life cycle. The team shares a quick checkpoint at the daily stand up, the scrum master fosters earnest discussions of team effectiveness with periodic retrospectives, project stakeholders can clearly see and interact with potentially shippable code at regularly occurring show and tells and ultimately the entire community can offer feedback due to frequent releases. This is a powerful cycle as early and frequent feedback can help move a product in a positive direction, keep a team excited, and ultimately lead to more business value. But this entire structure is predicated upon the team receiving valuable and relevant feedback. Having such a structure is not enough, we need to make sure the quality of our feedback loops is sufficient too. more »

Working on an ongoing development project, one becomes familiar with the idea of technical debt very quickly. While many definitions abound, the best analogy I have heard is to compare technical debt to a financial debt. It may get you something faster in the short term, but eventually it will need to be repaid and with interest! Indeed, the current turmoil in the market shows just how devastating mismanaged debt can truly be. Fighting cultural dysfunction that allows technical debt to accumulate is a major challenge a scrum master faces. more »

“The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for.”
-Laura Ingalls Wilder

Nearly every large organization does it.  Just when we think we’ve learned…made an impact…demonstrated that success is possible on large projects in massive organizations riddled with problems…the need to control takes over, and lessons are lost.  Outdated management theory that has stifled innovation in our businesses for decades is reapplied.

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