<div dir="ltr">Well Ali, your analysis of Agile as merely a buzzword collection used by consultants to bilk corporates of whatever budget leftovers are sloshing around doesn't seem much less superficial or insulting than Nigel's original joke.<div>
<br></div><div>Given your purported appeal to reason, scientific analysis and self-reflection it seemed disappointingly simplistic.</div><div><br></div><div>Personally I'd be interested in seeing a reasoned critique written from experience, but that certainly wasn't it. Is there really no value in any of the principles or practices that come from Agile or XP? If not, why not?</div>
<div><br></div><div>Mark</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 11 January 2014 01:11, Najaf Ali <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ali@happybearsoftware.com" target="_blank">ali@happybearsoftware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="im"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><i>> As a consultant in the IT profession I do my best wherever I can to inform and educate, </i></span><br>
<div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><i><br></i></span></div></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">So would you say that the following is an example of you doing your best to inform and educate whenever you can?</span></div>
<div class="im">
<div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><i>> 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, <span style="color:rgb(255,0,0);font-family:'dejavu sans mono',monospace;font-size:11px;line-height:13px">SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier</span>)</i></div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><i><br></i></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><i>> Most are rather like this guy: <a href="https://twitter.com/sleepyfox/statuses/416556441885896704" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/sleepyfox/statuses/416556441885896704</a><br>
</i></div></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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. </div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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 <i>especially</i> 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 <i>not</i> applying this level of scrutiny is bad science, bad software and ultimately bad business.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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. </div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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 <i>definitely</i> 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?</div>
<div class="im">
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><i style="font-size:small">> 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><br>
</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><i style="font-size:small"><br></i></div></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">While we're sharing our findings here, I've identified a number of key areas where Agile delivers <i>tremendous</i> business value, above and beyond it's original mandate.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">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.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">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.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">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.</div>
<div class="im">
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><i>> If people don't want to use Agile/XP/Scrum/FDD/whatever, that's fine by me, it's not a silver bullet.</i><br>
</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><i><br></i></div></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">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?</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">All the best,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">
<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">-Ali</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></div><div>[0]: Indeed my IQ (the last I did the test) is 94. Below average in general and almost definitely<i> </i>below average for our profession.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><div class="h5">
<div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Sleepyfox <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sleepyfox@gmail.com" target="_blank">sleepyfox@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:small">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. </div>
<div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">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.</div>
<div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">I personally feel that throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't productive. </div><div style="font-size:small">
<br></div><div style="font-size:small">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.</div>
<div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">Anthony's original post was aimed at people who do enjoy these things - a sentiment that I share. </div><div style="font-size:small">
<br></div><div style="font-size:small">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.</div>
<div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">All the best, </div><div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">
Fox</div><div style="font-size:small">--</div><div style="font-size:small"><br></div></div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 10 January 2014 16:54, Najaf Ali <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ali@happybearsoftware.com" target="_blank">ali@happybearsoftware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Agile is a member of the set buzzwords, so technically just fine without either.</div><div>
<div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:45 PM, Sleepyfox <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sleepyfox@gmail.com" target="_blank">sleepyfox@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:small">Najaf: just fine without Agile or just fine without buzzwords? </div>
<div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">
Fox</div><div style="font-size:small">--</div></div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 10 January 2014 16:31, Najaf Ali <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ali@happybearsoftware.com" target="_blank">ali@happybearsoftware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><i><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">> 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, </span><span style="color:rgb(255,0,0);font-family:'dejavu sans mono',monospace;font-size:11px;line-height:13px">SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier</span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">)</span></i><br>
</div><div><br></div></div>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.</div>
<div><div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Sleepyfox <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sleepyfox@gmail.com" target="_blank">sleepyfox@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:small">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, <span style="color:rgb(255,0,0);font-family:'dejavu sans mono',monospace;font-size:11px;line-height:13px">SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier</span>)</div>
<div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div>Most are rather like this guy: <a href="https://twitter.com/sleepyfox/statuses/416556441885896704" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/sleepyfox/statuses/416556441885896704</a><br>
</div><div><br></div><div>Fox</div><div>--</div></div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 10 January 2014 11:52, Anthony Green <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:anthony.charles.green@gmail.com" target="_blank">anthony.charles.green@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
In the meantime here's James Courtois and Hugo Corbucci on the Joys and Sorrows of Metaprogramming:<br>
<br>
<a href="https://vimeo.com/83768983" target="_blank">https://vimeo.com/83768983</a><br>
<br>
best<span><font color="#888888"><br>
<br>
Anthony Green<br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/xpjobs" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/xpjobs</a><br>
Job announcements for companies that practice eXtreme Programming<br>
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