Mind The Gap

Agile, in whatever form, has a set of core practices - iterative development, unit testing, continuous integration, etc. You can, by all means, choose not to include one or more of these core practices; but you better make damn sure you fill the gap with something else or you're headed for big trouble.

For instance, one core practice is the creation of acceptance tests for each story (use case) at the same time, or before, the story is being worked on. These acceptance tests are often created by test professionals who form part of the team. If you don't do this but instead see testing as seperate to development, then you need to do something to plug the knowledge gap. The testers are not going to know what to test. How can they? They're not involved in planning or daily stand ups. The usual response then is that "Agile doesn't work for testing because it is document-lite." Wrong, agile is document-lite because everyone is involved in the development process. Take that away and you have a gap. A gap you must fill. In this case by writing up your stories in detail for the testers to test against.

You see, the agile core practices work together, so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Take one of the parts away and you may very well find the whole is broken. At this point you may decide agile doesn't work. Not true, you broke it!

Scrum is Only a Recipe

I like Scrum. It offers a great template for getting started with agile project management. But the important word in the previous sentence is template. I see too many teams worrying if they are doing scrum properly. That's not the point, doing Scrum properly is not the point. The point is trying to make a process that suits your current situation that is as agile as possible. Scrum is just a useful first stepping stone in getting there.

The first time you cooked a recipe from a cookery book, you would follow it blindly. What else could you do? When you eat the food it may be too bland, so you next time you cook it you add a little salt; or it may be dry, so you adjust the cooking time. You use your previous experience to improve the outcome.

Agile is like that: execute, reflect, improve, repeat. Sprint planning not working for you? Find another way to do it. Users cannot go three weeks without changing the scope? Shorten the iteration length. Don't feel constrained by the scrum process, remember it's only a template, change the bits that aren't working for you.

Don't put up with crap food, improve your recipe.

Agile Parenting

Can agile be applied to parenting? I think so. Earlier today, my seven-year old daughter told me she found doing joined-up writing hard. My answer? If something is hard, do it more often.

I think I may need a holiday, oh, I am on holiday.

Happy new year.