[LRUG] [JOBS] Extreme Programming Opportunities

Fri Jan 10 17:11:05 PST 2014

*> As a consultant in the IT profession I do my best wherever I can to
inform and educate, *

So would you say that the following is an example of you doing your best to
inform and educate whenever you can?

*> I've also struggled with finding employers (in the past) or clients (now
that I'm running my own business) that even have agile.clue > 0 (as opposed
to say, SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier)*

*> Most are rather like this
guy: https://twitter.com/sleepyfox/statuses/416556441885896704
<https://twitter.com/sleepyfox/statuses/416556441885896704> *

What you're saying here is that most of the people who don't agree with
your vision of the one true way of developing software lack any technical
literacy. As a consultant, I'm genuinely interested in how communication
like this works for you in terms of informing and educating.

You're obviously an intelligent professional that has your clients best
interests at heart. If you're anything like me, you ruminate tirelessly
about whether or not you're actually delivering value. You keep copious
notes, cross-referenced from project to project, and spend a lot of time
thinking about what works well and what doesn't in a variety of contexts.

You're constantly on the lookout for flaws in your thinking, and you
bombard any assertions you make about best practices with as many counter
examples as you can to see if they hold up to the cold, hard light of
reality. As consultants we're *especially* prone to incentive-caused bias
(along with confirmation bias in general) so staying on firm rational
ground is generally an uphill struggle for us. As a fellow consultant, I
think you'll agree that *not* applying this level of scrutiny is bad
science, bad software and ultimately bad business.

After a deep, reflective analysis of your experiences, if part of your
central thesis of an optimal software development methodology is that most
people who don't agree with you can't distinguish between a warning from
the "cyber-police" and error messages in a browser console, then I'd like
to present a few counterexamples that will perhaps make you re-evaluate
your estimate of the probability of that hypothesis being true.

I've never claimed to be a particularly intelligent[0] or skilled
developer, but I think I can just about manage that distinction. My clients
all have the technical chops to *definitely* make that distinction. All of
our agile.clue properties are set to 0. How many more counterexamples do
you think you would need to re-evaluate that probability?

*> so whilst I do see some people's awareness of Agile (and especially XP
being close to my heart) being reduced to a buzzword, I take every
opportunity that I can to open their eyes to what a real difference these
values and principles have given us with modern development practices,
tools and systems.*

While we're sharing our findings here, I've identified a number of key
areas where Agile delivers *tremendous* business value, above and beyond
it's original mandate.

For large organisations: mass-consumption of departmental budget. Many
departments in large organisations value using up their entire budget and
more in order to receive a larger budget the following year. Spending this
on top-tier Agile consultants is like /dev/null for expenditure. Peoples
livelihoods demonstrably depend on this, so while it may seem like a
perversion of the idea of "business value", it still does a lot of material
good in the world, so is OK in my book.

For consultancies: being able to charge massively inflated rates with
little accountability. You can bill out a team of fresh graduates for £800
per day (each!) as long as you define their value in terms of process
instead of results. With Agile, if the project was successful you can take
the credit, if it wasn't you can explain that the client wasn't acting in
the true spirit of Agile. This provides plausible deniability for
consultancies, allowing them to mitigate project risk consistently,
definitely a useful advantage to have.

For me personally: client or developer qualification. If a client/developer
professes a passion for a particular methodology or holds a toolkit 'close
to their heart' then they're an immediate no-go for me. I'm not the kind of
consultant they need and they're not the kind of client I want to work
with. I'm always going to offer arguing from first principles, critical
thinking and empiricism before best practices, argument from authority and
cargo culting. Being able to disqualify clients that aren't a good fit as
early as possible obviously means a lot to me in terms of opportunity
costs. It's also good for them, as I only want to work with clients I can
deliver outstanding results for and would prefer to refer unsuitable
clients to more appropriate consultants as early in the process as possible.

*> If people don't want to use Agile/XP/Scrum/FDD/whatever, that's fine by
me, it's not a silver bullet.*

It's not a silver bullet, but if you don't agree then you've missed the
cluetrain and are so bad at building software that you think the
cyber-police have got into your computer and are giving you warning
messages about child abuse. Would you agree at least that there's some
conflict in your stance towards non-believers in this comment and your
previous email?

All the best,

-Ali

[0]: Indeed my IQ (the last I did the test) is 94. Below average in general
and almost definitely below average for our profession.

P.S. If speaking negatively about Agile is against the LRUG code of conduct
(but speaking negatively about people who don't buy into it isn't) then in
order to avoid future complications, it would be very useful for me to have
a list of topics added to the LRUG code of conduct that we're not allowed
to speak negatively about. I'm only 10.39% joking about this.

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Sleepyfox <sleepyfox at gmail.com> wrote:

> Words have emotional attachments for people. I personally have to deal
> almost every week with prospects, colleagues or clients who conflate
> dictionary definitions of the word 'agile' with Agile methodologies, Agile
> tools or techniques and Agile principles and values, needless to say this
> is frequently a cause of confusion.
>
> As a consultant in the IT profession I do my best wherever I can to inform
> and educate, so whilst I do see some people's awareness of Agile (and
> especially XP being close to my heart) being reduced to a buzzword, I take
> every opportunity that I can to open their eyes to what a real difference
> these values and principles have given us with modern development
> practices, tools and systems.
>
> I personally feel that throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't
> productive.
>
> If people don't want to use Agile/XP/Scrum/FDD/whatever, that's fine by
> me, it's not a silver bullet. If you get on just fine without TDD, pairing,
> CI etc. then fair enough.
>
> Anthony's original post was aimed at people who do enjoy these things - a
> sentiment that I share.
>
> To further the discussion, I've run a Code Dojo at 7digital and they seem
> pretty switched on about these things, same for Unruly Media and Badoo,
> though I don't know whether either of these are currently recruiting.
>
> All the best,
>
> Fox
> --
>
>
>
> On 10 January 2014 16:54, Najaf Ali <ali at happybearsoftware.com> wrote:
>
>> Agile is a member of the set buzzwords, so technically just fine without
>> either.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:45 PM, Sleepyfox <sleepyfox at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Najaf: just fine without Agile or just fine without buzzwords?
>>>
>>> Fox
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>>> On 10 January 2014 16:31, Najaf Ali <ali at happybearsoftware.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> *> Thanks Anthony, that's a great idea. I've also struggled with
>>>> finding employers (in the past) or clients (now that I'm running > my own
>>>> business) that even have agile.clue > 0 (as opposed to say, SyntaxError:
>>>> Unexpected identifier)*
>>>>
>>>> As someone who's experienced more than his fair share of the church of
>>>> Agile and other forms of buzzword-driven-development, please: send them my
>>>> way! My clients and I get on just fine without it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Sleepyfox <sleepyfox at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks Anthony, that's a great idea. I've also struggled with finding
>>>>> employers (in the past) or clients (now that I'm running my own business)
>>>>> that even have agile.clue > 0 (as opposed to say, SyntaxError:
>>>>> Unexpected identifier)
>>>>>
>>>>> Most are rather like this guy:
>>>>> https://twitter.com/sleepyfox/statuses/416556441885896704
>>>>>
>>>>> Fox
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 10 January 2014 11:52, Anthony Green <
>>>>> anthony.charles.green at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Frustrated at being unable to find roles with organisations that
>>>>>> embrace XP practices: pairing, TDD, GOOS, CI etc I've created a Twitter
>>>>>> account for those in the same boat: @XPJobs.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It's low posting as you can imagine but if people know of genuine
>>>>>> opportunities that fore fill that explicit criteria and you tweet them
>>>>>> would you mind CC'ing that account.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In the meantime here's James Courtois and Hugo Corbucci on the Joys
>>>>>> and Sorrows of Metaprogramming:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://vimeo.com/83768983
>>>>>>
>>>>>> best
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Anthony Green
>>>>>> https://twitter.com/xpjobs
>>>>>> Job announcements for companies that practice eXtreme Programming
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Chat mailing list
>>>>>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>>>>>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Chat mailing list
>>>>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>>>>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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