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Has Agile been able to ward off the werewolves?
 As we get close to Halloween, it is fitting that we revisit one of the most famous software development articles by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. titled “No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” published back in 1987. It was an interesting and still relevant metaphor he used about the “werewolves” that can make your projects:
Transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest… The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products. So we hear desperate cries for a silver bullet--something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do. But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
If we fast forward nearly 30 years after the article was written (which is equivalent to almost a hundred years in IT years), can we say that we are better off than the time Brooks wrote his article? Wasn’t Agile thought of (or often marketed) as the “silver bullet” that will wipe away all those software project werewolves?
I think we’ve made a lot of progress since then and Agile has been a great framework and method, but my honest opinion is that it is in no way a silver bullet and to be fair it was never created to be such. But like a lot of things that gets created to solve a problem and achieves a high level of success, people in their excitement with the results over hype it, with the evangelist and disciples trying to apply it everywhere and inappropriately.
But the most enlightening part of the article was section related to “the development of approaches and tools for rapid prototyping of systems as prototyping is part of the iterative specification of requirements.” This basically is the core tenant of Agile and Brooks takes it further by advocating software that grows organically, for “each added function and new provision for more complex data or circumstances grows organically out of what is already there.”
By using this ingenious metaphor, it makes us view software not just as some static system but one that grows organically which entails the need for nurturing and the right environment to promote and encourage that growth.
I couldn’t think of a better way to describe the Agile process then this article that was written well before Agile as we know it came into being.
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Posted on: October 16, 2013 12:27 PM
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Agile is starting to get pretty personal
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As much as I try to keep up with and write about trends in Agile project management, I always seem to learn something new! Though the trend of applying Agile for personal productivity is nothing new, the fact that there are two published books on this topic is new to me. Here's a couple of good books that may be worth you while if you are interested in applying Agile for your personal productivity initiatives. The first is titled Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life
As the books blub outlines:
Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress. Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices. Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve the way we work and the way we make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives. Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.
Another book with a similar bent, but looking at the application of Lean overall for personal productivity is A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance
 by Dan Markovitz:
This book's blub outlines the book's content as follows:
A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance describes how you can foster a new mindset and improve your performance by applying Lean methods to your work. It translates powerful Lean tools such as visual management, flow, pull, 5S, and kaizen to your daily work, revealing how they can help to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and link you ever more closely to customer value. This practice will help you develop better self-awareness, more disciplined problem-solving skills, and the ability to self-correct errors.
This book not only provides the tools, but also teaches you how to find the root causes underlying your inefficiencies so you can eliminate them permanently. It will enable you to immediately improve personal productivity while developing the skills needed for continuous improvement. It includes real-world examples that illustrate how these principles have been successfully applied across a range of industries. Providing the perfect mix of what-to-do with why-to-do it, the text details a step-by-step approach to applying Lean principles to your work.
As if you did not have enough books and articles to read! But the payoff for reading these two books may will be worth the effort to spend since if you're already doing Agile, you are already familiar with the tools to become instantly productive for personal projects. For thoese new to Agile, what better way to start realizing the benefits than to see them in your personal life!
In this light, Agile is definitely starting to get pretty personal but in a very good way.
A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance describes how you can foster a new mindset and improve your performance by applying Lean methods to your work. It translates powerful Lean tools such as visual management, flow, pull, 5S, and kaizen to your daily work, revealing how they can help to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and link you ever more closely to customer value. This practice will help you develop better self-awareness, more disciplined problem-solving skills, and the ability to self-correct errors.
This book not only provides the tools, but also teaches you how to find the root causes underlying your inefficiencies so you can eliminate them permanently. It will enable you to immediately improve personal productivity while developing the skills needed for continuous improvement. It includes real-world examples that illustrate how these principles have been successfully applied across a range of industries. Providing the perfect mix of what-to-do with why-to-do it, the text details a step-by-step approach to applying Lean principles to your work.
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Posted on: September 17, 2013 01:34 PM
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Become a Professional Scrum Master without taking a course
| Seems the Scrum certification battles are heating up! The Scrum.org group founded by Ken Schwaber, the original co-founder of Scrum who broke with Scrum Alliance a couple years ago due to his dissatisfaction of where that group was heading, has now made obtaining their Scrum Master certifications such as the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) simply a matter of taking and passing their online assessments:
The Professional Scrum Master level 1 (PSM I) assessment is available to anyone who wishes to validate his or her fundamental knowledge of the Scrum framework and its application. Those that pass the assessment will receive the industry recognized PSM I Certification to demonstrate their mastery of the content.
Taking a course is not required. While a 2-day Professional Scrum Foundations or Professional Scrum Master course is highly recommended, if you feel you already possess a high level of Scrum knowledge, you have the option to take the PSM I assessment directly. The PSM I assessment is grounded in the Scrum Body of Knowledge at Scrum.org, but is quite difficult. Parts of the assessment may ask the taker to think about or interpret the meaning from the Scrum Guide. Or, in some cases, apply their own experience.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the Scrum Alliance take a similar route and I would imagine that this will have implications for those who make their living as Scrum trainers and coaches.
The Professional Scrum Master level 1 (PSM I) assessment is available to anyone who wishes to validate his or her fundamental knowledge of the Scrum framework and its application. Those that pass the assessment will receive the industry recognized PSM I Certification to demonstrate their mastery of the content.
Taking a course is not required. While a 2-day Professional Scrum Foundations or Professional Scrum Master course is highly recommended, if you feel you already possess a high level of Scrum knowledge, you have the option to take the PSM I assessment directly. The PSM I assessment is grounded in the Scrum Body of Knowledge at Scrum.org, but is quite difficult. Parts of the assessment may ask the taker to think about or interpret the meaning from the Scrum Guide. Or, in some cases, apply their own experience.
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Posted on: September 09, 2013 08:40 AM
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Comments (1)
Does Kanban really matter for Agile?
| I think it does and this webinar outlines why Kanban matters for Agile teams:
It's a nice general introduction and for those with a PMP and/or PMI-ACP certification, you can receive 1 PDU for watching since the webinar is just over an hour long. Enjoy! |
Posted on: September 03, 2013 04:15 PM
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Comments (3)
The Yin-Yang of Agile-Lean
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I thought it was interesting thatI thought it was interesting that an article in the very mainstream Huffington Post is about the application of Agile to one’s personal life. It goes on about how to use “retrospectives” as a way to step back, stop and review where one is in life and plan forward just enough to get the highest priority items done. This is sound advice which I think we all agree.
I thought it was interesting that an article in the very mainstream Huffington Post is about the application of Agile to one’s personal life. It goes on about how to use “retrospectives” as a way to step back, stop and review where one is in life and plan forward just enough to get the highest priority items done. This is sound advice which I think we all agree.
But one quote in particular caught my eye which is when the author Michele Serro states:
“Lean is a predominantly entrepreneur discipline; its aim is to build the right thing. Agile is predominantly a developer discipline; its aim is to build the thing right.”
In general, I think that’s a pretty good way of comparing the two methods as it puts it in the perspective of a kind of Yin-Yang relationship and accounts for why Lean has become a quite popular and growing addition to the Agile suite of methods. Think of terms like value stream, Kaisen, Kanban, etc. in the Agile vocabulary and this is truly the case.
In the final analysis, what this nice little quote is indicative of is that fact that we need to see and think more about how the various Agile processes and methods complement and integrate with each other, which is a bit more Eastern approach, rather than to view these as separate and distinct concepts applicable to a specific domain, which is a more Western perspective.
What do you think? Do you mainly view the complementary aspects of Agile or the distinctness of them? Which is better?
What do you think? Do you mainly view the complementary aspects of Agile or the distinctness of them? Which is better? an article in the very mainstream Huffington Post is about the application of Agile to one’s personal life. It goes on about how to use “retrospectives” as a way to step back, stop and review where one is in life and plan forward just enough to get the highest priority items done. This is sound advice which I think we all agree.
But one quote in particular caught my eye which is when the author Michele Serro states:
“Lean is a predominantly entrepreneur discipline; its aim is to build the right thing. Agile is predominantly a developer discipline; its aim is to build the thing right.”
In general, I think that’s a pretty good way of comparing the two methods as it puts it in the perspective of a kind of Yin-Yang relationship and accounts for why Lean has become a quite popular and growing addition to the Agile suite of methods. Think of terms like value stream, Kaisen, Kanban, etc. in the Agile vocabulary and this is truly the case.
In the final analysis, what this nice little quote is indicative of is that fact that we need to see and think more about how the various Agile processes and methods complement and integrate with each other, which is a bit more Eastern approach, rather than to view these as separate and distinct concepts applicable to a specific domain, which is a more Western perspective.
What do you think? Do you mainly view the complementary aspects of Agile or the distinctness of them? Which is better?
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Posted on: August 27, 2013 11:32 AM
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Comments (2)