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Oct
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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. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The origins of the prayer are not fully known. In 1939, a version was taken from an obituary and shared with one of the founders of AA. The concept can arguably be traced back Boethius, an ancient Christian philosopher in the 6th century. I find it refreshing to see something with such a distant past be so relevant. Contained within the prayer are three key elements at the heart of what I think Agile is. First, we must acknowledge that some things are beyond our control. This is the central failing of waterfall software development, as it tries to bring order to something that is far too complex. Secondly, things like scrum do not solve problems they only reveal them. We need the personal courage to confront and address those problems when they inevitably rear their ugly heads. As I have heard several of my peers have said, Agile will not solve your problems, it will make your problems apparent. What you do about them is up to you. Lastly, we must have the wisdom to know what things can be controlled and what things can not. This level of judgment is pivotal to successful projects. While we can not control a two year development project, we should be able to control daily builds, and the standards that we code to. “We’re Agile” is not an antidote to a poorly thought out business case. As more and more people adopt an Agile mindset, we need to pay attention to this final attribute. In one’s haste to get potentially shipable code, we need always judiciously decide what to challenges to try and control and what to work around. We find ourselves creating an illusion of control if we confront those immutable challenges, and if we fail to stand up to those we should, we drift about with no direction. There is no single formula for this, and that is what I find most exciting about our profesion!
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Brian - nicely put. As I wrote in a comment on a post by Mike Dwyer, I find the metaphor of R&D vs manufacturing resonates well with my clients. In R&D, you are in discovery mode where it’s always safe to say, “I don’t know.” and “I tried this, it didn’t work, and here’s what I learned.”
Philosophically speaking, in a very practical way…
If we accept that there’s effectively infinite to know and we learn parts by trying things, we need to discover enough to achieve the goal of the moment. That as good as it gets and is sufficient. Thanks for your post.
Jay
Jay, I like your analogy between a factory verse a research laboratory. It certainly cuts to the heart of the challenges of efficiency verse effectiveness. However, that analogy is perhaps itself a little limited, because there are things we do that should be like a factory. A team should have sufficient discipline to model consistently, code to standards, and use CI to run frequent builds. I think this is one big challenge I’ve found, as some people have a hard time distinguishing where they should be flexible and where they should have discipline.