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I think Markham makes a good contrast between Agile with a capital 'a' invoking the marketing masses and high book sales, and agile with a lowercase 'a' alludin

by cmoses 17y ago

I think Markham makes a good contrast between Agile with a capital 'a' invoking the marketing masses and high book sales, and agile with a lowercase 'a' alluding to simply quick and coordinated movement by a team. Markham would agree agile is different for every company, but I'd like to point out that if you want to implement agile for a student team of developers working on a software product, your timeboxes are stretched out--so you're still using agile but you make it work for your developers.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I'd like to add a little here. Agile, whether big or little 'a', is about some kind of stressors and some kind of adapting to meet those stressors. I described those stressors in general terms as "business value" -- making something quickly that people want -- but you can fit a lot of things into "business value" For instance, on a student project, those stressors can be incremental timeboxes (if you have 3 months, why not have 2-week or 1-week cycles with a demo to one of your peer groups? After all, there's a difference between a build/demo iteration and a release iteration) What I'm getting at is that you're always making some kind of sub-optimal trade-off for the greater good. That's why agile is so tough in schools and large organizations -- the lack of stressors means a lack of impetus to adapt. Many times the first sprint looks just like the last one, or you stretch your sprints to meet the class deadline, or you slipping schedules is routine, etc.
- cmoses 17y ago
  Nice point. But I would argue that the stressors are the same kinds of deadlines as you would see in any professional organization. From my experience working on a student developer team (attempting to use agile), the reason it doesn't work in a school setting is the lack of daily updates and meetings among team members since it's hard to coordinate the schedules any decent-sized team of students and to convince them to reorganize their workload to meet the weekly or bi-monthly deadlines. The worst case scenario is a lower grade on your project, rather than the stressor of losing your bonus or worse--getting fired.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    I think I was unclear. Student agile and big-corp agile can have a lot in common. In really large organizations, developers can be multi-allocated to several different development teams and be working on 5 or 6 projects at the same time. In addition, slipping schedules is the norm. And you can have multiple channels of managers, making accountability problematic. So the stressors don't always apply at big companies either. That's why I use the startup metaphor. In the startup world, you produce value or you die. There are techniques to use, of course. You can insist on daily stand-ups and an hour or two of co-located time per day -- to the point of refusing to be on the team if it's not done. But that gets into a whole other area of courage and agile teams which is probably another thread.

by cmoses 17y ago

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I'd like to add a little here. Agile, whether big or little 'a', is about some kind of stressors and some kind of adapting to meet those stressors. I described those stressors in general terms as "business value" -- making something quickly that people want -- but you can fit a lot of things into "business value" For instance, on a student project, those stressors can be incremental timeboxes (if you have 3 months, why not have 2-week or 1-week cycles with a demo to one of your peer groups? After all, there's a difference between a build/demo iteration and a release iteration) What I'm getting at is that you're always making some kind of sub-optimal trade-off for the greater good. That's why agile is so tough in schools and large organizations -- the lack of stressors means a lack of impetus to adapt. Many times the first sprint looks just like the last one, or you stretch your sprints to meet the class deadline, or you slipping schedules is routine, etc.

cmoses 17y ago
Nice point. But I would argue that the stressors are the same kinds of deadlines as you would see in any professional organization. From my experience working on a student developer team (attempting to use agile), the reason it doesn't work in a school setting is the lack of daily updates and meetings among team members since it's hard to coordinate the schedules any decent-sized team of students and to convince them to reorganize their workload to meet the weekly or bi-monthly deadlines. The worst case scenario is a lower grade on your project, rather than the stressor of losing your bonus or worse--getting fired.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  I think I was unclear. Student agile and big-corp agile can have a lot in common. In really large organizations, developers can be multi-allocated to several different development teams and be working on 5 or 6 projects at the same time. In addition, slipping schedules is the norm. And you can have multiple channels of managers, making accountability problematic. So the stressors don't always apply at big companies either. That's why I use the startup metaphor. In the startup world, you produce value or you die. There are techniques to use, of course. You can insist on daily stand-ups and an hour or two of co-located time per day -- to the point of refusing to be on the team if it's not done. But that gets into a whole other area of courage and agile teams which is probably another thread.