Agile —
I’ve seen recent discussions in various forums about the meaning of XP values and principles. Here are my current working definitions.
Values. A description of preference between alternatives. Often the alternatives represent candidate courses of action and the value guides the selection among the alternatives. Sometimes values are basically axioms. They can be irrational in the [...]
Why do some teams allow technical debt to accumulate and others are better at recognizing the debt and actively reducing it? One possibility is a skill difference. This skill difference could be the result of differing experience or differences in intelligence. In any case, the theory is that a more experienced, skilled team will generally [...]
Kevin Brady claims they are in his recent blog article “AGILE /SCRUM Fails to get to grips with Human Psychology“. After reading his article, it seems it should have been named something like “Agile Methods Do Not Cure Dysfunctional Organizations”. I believe the latter is true. I think agilists understand this at some level and [...]
Agile coach and trainer Mishkin Berteig recently wrote a blog article called “The Seven Core Practices of Agile Work” where he highlighted the importance of effective (“powerful”) communication. I agree. In my experience, effective communication is often the most important factor in project success. However, my views about the nature of effective communication are different. [...]
James Shore wrote an interesting blog article called “Voluntary Technical Debt“. He and Dave Woldrich are developing a commercial service called cardmeeting.com to support distributed agile teams. Shore describes how he and Dave cut corners with their initial implementation, intended to be a “spike“, because of time pressure to demonstrate the software at the [...]