I am going off "Agile"No, I am not going to give up test-driven development. In fact, I am doing more of it by adopting more behavior-driven development, which is actually harder at certain cases. It helps me understand the code and verifies the design (I believe it does that rather than "drives" out the design nowadays but that is another post).
No, I am not going to give up aggressive refactoring. Every time, and I do mean EVERY TIME, I slack on it, I end up paying the price one way or another and kicking myself. I have been proud of every single line of code that I have produced (cannot say that for all the code that I have inherited and worked on), and they always serve me and my team well.
No, I am not going to give up on iterative development in the form of Iterations or Sprints. They help my teams focus, avoid distractions, and can still response to the request from outside the team with crystal clear transparency.
So what is it?
I am going to take "agile" off my vocabulary in all communications.
Rather than saying
"Not able to have QA accepting the stories as soon as they are finished is not agile"I'll say "We need to get those finished stories accepted as soon as possible, so that we can close the feedback loop. When they are accepted, we know we are doing a good job. And when they are not, we can trace back to our thoughts as we were developing them and understand where it went wrong".
Rather than saying
"Not setting a goal at the begining of the Sprint and verifying them through the Sprint signature is not agile"I'll say "We need to establish a way to provide feedback regarding our work and make continuous improvement to the way we work, so that we can provide better value to the people who pay us. One way we can do that is to look back at our progress in the past Sprint, talk about our experiences and thoughts, and come up with action items to make things better"
Apparently this will make conversation longer, because I have to present proof more than a good book (dozens of good books available as a matter of fact). Sometimes, I will have to wait, patiently, for the opportunity to present itself so that I can use as an example to persuade others to slow down, do it right, and do it well.
Why
I have been thinking along this line for a while. I read the "Good Agile and Bad Agile", felt annoyed because there is truth in what he is saying. From time to time, I get annoyed by the negative comments that don't even make sense to me. I wrote one post about "Things You Cannot Get Certified For", and argued hard on several news groups that I subscribe.
Very soon I got tired of it. Using the word "agile" has caused more distraction than its worth. Practices are sometimes picked upon literally and are attacked. Rather than looking at the value something is trying to bring, many seem to tend to look at the cost(time, tools, processes) first. It got attacked, it got debated, and at the end nothing is done and the bad things just keep going. And you get people from all over the world writing about how "agile" did not work for them and laughing at anyone who is interested in trying.
To add insult to injury, you can also hear usage of agile in the format like "Let's be agile about it, instead of insisting on ... ". It is really hard to argue in this situation, because you cannot just simply say "no, lets not be agile about it because we should insist on going through this three hour meeting to make sure that our stories are up to the standard".
I have been avoiding throwing agile around for a while and I think I am happy with the result. I also have been ignoring the bad usage of 'agile' out there so that I can stay healthy to focus on bringing agility to my teams. (I swear this is the last time). A month ago, I went through all my blog posts and took agile out of the labels and categories. This post will remain the only one with "Agile" as the label.
I have been thinking about writing a post like this and finally decided to do it after reading James' post "The Decline and Fall of Agile"
Other References
I am collecting references of others with similar ideas here:
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