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if one were to read the motivating factors behind personas as described in “the inmates are running the asylum”, one would never come up with A. If one were to

if one were to read the motivating factors behind personas as described in “the inmates are running the asylum”, one would never come up with A. If one were to follow agile in principle (do; evaluate; improve what hurts; repeat), one would not end up with capital-A Agile Industry prescribing process by the book. This sounds like the same reason people avoided C++: after seeing lots of unnecessary complex C++ just for the sake of being “object-oriented” but entirely missing the point, who’d think it’s possible to write clearer code in C++?

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Maybe it's because people aren't being introduced to personas in the proper context, with examples of proper usage? Personally, I've seen the concept in some software books and articles, but didn't really make use of it because my impression was that they want you to produce answers like the example A here, and then to magically divine some insights out of them.
wpietri 9y ago
Yeah. I think one of the deep problems is that people don't know why they're doing something (or refuse to admit it to themselves). A lot of the very early Agile adopters were there because they sincerely wanted to make better software. They were willing to be bold and do a lot of hard work. But after them came all the people who thought the wanted to make better software. The ones who wanted to feel bold and have the appearance of change without doing much work. Those people were ripe for the sorts of consultants and books and certifications that promised the moon while letting them slap Agile decals on the dumb stuff they were already doing. And what they were already doing was a lot of top-down nonsense that helped powerful people feel powerful. "Yes, Mr. Executive! This will deliver the exact thing you wanted! And it will be precisely on time, for whatever you mean by 'on time'! And have no defects!" It was nonsense, of course. But it let people pretend to be doing what they wanted to think of themselves doing, while also letting them actually do what they really wanted to do.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Maybe it's because people aren't being introduced to personas in the proper context, with examples of proper usage? Personally, I've seen the concept in some software books and articles, but didn't really make use of it because my impression was that they want you to produce answers like the example A here, and then to magically divine some insights out of them.

wpietri 9y ago

Yeah. I think one of the deep problems is that people don't know why they're doing something (or refuse to admit it to themselves). A lot of the very early Agile adopters were there because they sincerely wanted to make better software. They were willing to be bold and do a lot of hard work. But after them came all the people who thought the wanted to make better software. The ones who wanted to feel bold and have the appearance of change without doing much work. Those people were ripe for the sorts of consultants and books and certifications that promised the moon while letting them slap Agile decals on the dumb stuff they were already doing. And what they were already doing was a lot of top-down nonsense that helped powerful people feel powerful. "Yes, Mr. Executive! This will deliver the exact thing you wanted! And it will be precisely on time, for whatever you mean by 'on time'! And have no defects!" It was nonsense, of course. But it let people pretend to be doing what they wanted to think of themselves doing, while also letting them actually do what they really wanted to do.