Admit it, all of us cyber coolies keep hearing about this big need for us to be not waterfall-ish(is that even a word?). Well if you haven't heard yet, don't bother, you are anyways not going to find another job after working where you are. Time and again, somebody is going to walk in to a room and lecture you on how "we" need to be ...wait for it...."AGILE" and follow scrum. Let us start with a cartoon strip.
First time you hear about it and read about it on the internet, you would fall in love with it. You would know that this is exactly what you wanted. No planning, no specs and just start writing code and hope that it works, brag about how the lack of structure made you code the way you did, walk into a retro meeting and bad mouth everything that happened through out. Who on earth would hate that as an engineer? Well, your manager.
Once you are out of that illusional delight, you understand what it is. It is all about getting a lot of work done, in very little time. Since everybody in the team knows about this, they take it easy on what they ...wait for it..."commit" to. You usually turn up at the end of your iteration with a whole bunch of incomplete work and a grin on your face. And you do this multiple times before your scrum master calls you an unreliable and lazy son of a bitch.
Your stage three is where you spend time getting your user story right. Most part of your day is spent on "refining" the scope of your story, since you don't want to be labelled an unreliable nincompoop. After wasting lot of time, you turn up in a stand up and clearly communicate that your task is "at risk". This is when your manager wishes he had never corrected you when you were in stage 1. Don't be demotivated since it is that part of your life where you would be labelled as having a "cautious" approach and less "throughput".
Finally, if you don't give up and go back to stage 1, you would realize that there is more to do in this world than what time and money would allow you to and you just need to stay focussed and do your best with the time in hand(you can't do much about the money anyway). This is roughly the time where you know enough to walk into a meeting and say to people that Agile is a "cultural change". You say this with a straight face and your audience having no idea what that means. You also quote the example of how nine women could deliver a baby in a month with "Agile". This is mostly the time they nominate you to be their scrum master or agility coach. Congratulations!
PS: I know that agile is not about scrum, but feel free to comment about it.
First time you hear about it and read about it on the internet, you would fall in love with it. You would know that this is exactly what you wanted. No planning, no specs and just start writing code and hope that it works, brag about how the lack of structure made you code the way you did, walk into a retro meeting and bad mouth everything that happened through out. Who on earth would hate that as an engineer? Well, your manager.
Once you are out of that illusional delight, you understand what it is. It is all about getting a lot of work done, in very little time. Since everybody in the team knows about this, they take it easy on what they ...wait for it..."commit" to. You usually turn up at the end of your iteration with a whole bunch of incomplete work and a grin on your face. And you do this multiple times before your scrum master calls you an unreliable and lazy son of a bitch.
Your stage three is where you spend time getting your user story right. Most part of your day is spent on "refining" the scope of your story, since you don't want to be labelled an unreliable nincompoop. After wasting lot of time, you turn up in a stand up and clearly communicate that your task is "at risk". This is when your manager wishes he had never corrected you when you were in stage 1. Don't be demotivated since it is that part of your life where you would be labelled as having a "cautious" approach and less "throughput".
Finally, if you don't give up and go back to stage 1, you would realize that there is more to do in this world than what time and money would allow you to and you just need to stay focussed and do your best with the time in hand(you can't do much about the money anyway). This is roughly the time where you know enough to walk into a meeting and say to people that Agile is a "cultural change". You say this with a straight face and your audience having no idea what that means. You also quote the example of how nine women could deliver a baby in a month with "Agile". This is mostly the time they nominate you to be their scrum master or agility coach. Congratulations!
PS: I know that agile is not about scrum, but feel free to comment about it.
