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Self-Awareness: An Overlooked Key to Agility
I was surprised to hear this phrase used at the end of my tutorial on using the Crystal methods [1] for agile development. Crystal has been particularly vexing to convey to people, because it is a family of stretchable-shrinkable human-centered methodologies for projects, constructed from seven design principles and targeting seven desirable project properties. Because it is principle- and property-based, instead of being prescriptive, people in my lectures enjoy hearing about this approach--but then can’t describe it to others afterward.
So this time, at the end of the three-hour session, I asked the people in the audience to pretend their colleague in the hall asked them: “So, what’s Crystal about?” And the first person to answer (as she was walking out the door to meet someone), said, “It’s about self-awareness.”
This stopped me, because it is not a phrase we hear in project life, and also because it is, for a short sentence, a really accurate characterization of the Crystal methods (and the main reason Crystal is so hard to sell and install).
Thinking about it later, I realized that the top three agile methods are all about self-something, and that these phrases provide a key to the unspoken core of agile development. Here is how I would summarize the three leading agile methodologies in short strokes:&…
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