Agile is a simple topic

Agile manifesto is probably one of the best ever written manifestos in software development if not the best. Simple and elegant. Good vs Bad 1 2 3 4, done. It is so simple that I am constantly disappointed by the amount of stuff that floating on the Internet about, what is agile what is not, how to do agile, Scrum, Kanban and who knows what will pop up next year claiming to to be another king of agile.

If I ever tell you we are the purist agile team and we don't have sprint, we don't have stand up meetings, we don't story board, we don't have burn down charts, we don't have planning poker cards, we don't have any of the buzzwords, most of the so called IT consultants will hang me on the spot.

Let's face it, being pure isn't about what you have, it is about what you don't! The pure gold has nothing but gold that's why it is super valuable. We should build our teams on developers, codes and business needs. The three pure ingredient of a team, any one taken away a team is no more.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. 

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Exactly the manifesto is saying "we value less on processes and tools" and yet we have seen all kinds of weird super imposed processes and tools everywhere. "Look, we have standups, we have sprints, we have story boards therefore we agile". NO, absolutely NOT. You can walk like a duck, quack like duck, but you are still not a duck.

But why the hype anyway?

Partly the consulting companies are to be blamed, they try to sell the buzz words to the management so that they can make $$$ by simply asking the developers to do what they already know, writing codes, but in a different way.

The biggest enemies are all the developers especially the team leaders and managers. Because they are lazy to know the developers (the people), lazy to learn the codes (the working software) the lazy to analyse the business needs. Because "in the end of the day I need to show my developers that I am doing a manager's work", "what is the shortcut?", "look, I just got this scrum from a random blog post, standups 5 mins, no problems. Poker cards, easy. Story boards, no big deal ... ". "Done, now we are scrum, now we are agile, if the things fail, it is the developers problem". Goodbye, there goes a team.

So now you question me, "you said agile is simple, why it looks so hard now?"

Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.

Woody Guthrie

People are born equal, a genius doesn't magically popup, it takes real hard work to reach that level. Let's go back to the origin, the mighty manifesto.

Get rid of all unnecessary processes and tools, and go talk to people. "What is Jimmy's strength? What can we do to make up for Sam's weakness? Is David and Carl a good pair?".

Stop typing inside Words or Excel, go read the real codes, "What can we do the enhance the clarity of the codes, how to improve the performance without too much sacrifice, what are the alternative ways to extend our software".

Stop coming up with imaginary use cases, go meet the customer "What are your point points, what are the 3 most important features that need to be enhanced and delivered. Based on our statistics, we believe if we build feature X in such a way, the business can grow in Y%, do you think we should do this?"

Stop wasting our life on keeping a useless backlog, go see the 3 biggest opportunities and threats and work on them, rise and repeat. If fact that is exactly how evolution bring our human to this stage, "eliminate the immediate threat to ensure the short term survival, and seek the opportunities for long term growth". As we all decadents of the mother nature, we are incapable of out smart her, so learn from her.

real process/methodology grows from the team not super imposed on to the team

real process/methodology does not have a name because it is unique to each team

Grow your own dream team!



Thanks for wasting your time reading my rant