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.

Today, those few nuggets of value have been tweaked, twittered, extrapolated and inflated to the point that almost any tool, software add on, metric that can be conjured is associated to all of the following slides.

• Agile Priniciples
• Agile Manifesto
• Jim Johnson’s 2002 xp presentation
• Anyone of a number of Scrum graphics
• Scott Amblers data

And presto we have a new something or other.

I go back to Jim Highsmith’s comment regarding that there is more written about Agile than is known.

Right On Dude!

I guess that makes the people I work with on the outside, Everything we talk about is based on what we have experienced leading, coaching, and training. We know it works and we know how many errors we made finding this out.

AH, INSIGHT!

Perhaps there is a way to find out how much of the PowerPoint has Power by asking the presenter, how many mistakes it took to stumble across the gem they are offering. Hmm let’s see,  I can read about Mike Cohn’s stumbling into planning poker and points, just like I can listen to Ken Schwaber tell me about all the things he has done that did not work. If you want a good laugh, ask Jeff Sutherland or Ron Jeffries what surprises they have had. Dave Anderson still moans about all the things he would change in his book that he knows are wrong. Sanjiv Augustine too. I could go on and on with the people I know who have told me, written about it, but then I know I would forget someone like Jean Tabaka or Hubert Smits and I wouldn’t want to do that. SO all I can do is tell you what I remember.  Now wouldn’t it be nice if we had some record of all of our screw-ups?

Me? Hey…My most recent learnings are about how QA and Architecture teams impact large projects.  Most important finding is understanding how to get them acting like teams and not support staff.  Second most important finding is getting the rest of the teams to see their value early.  The mistake that led me to these learnings was assuming that Architects, QA and their management wanted them to act like teams after they said they did.  Key lesson learned.  Count the number of steps taken, not the words spoken.  Then again this may be why the straw really broke.

So where is the beef in all these presentations? Maybe we ought start asking.