coming soon
2024
Why devastated wasteland? Kent Beck, a signer of the legendary agile manifesto, responsed with this phrase during an interview in 2020. It's an evocative phrase, perfectly placed to get a reader riled up and engaged with the purpose of these processes, practices and principles.
Q: You signed the Agile Manifesto almost 20 years ago. How do you feel about agile now?
A: It's a devastated wasteland. The life has been sucked out of it. It's a few religious rituals carried out by people who don't understand the purpose that those rituals were intended to serve in the first place.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec lacinia iaculis ultricies. Morbi non dictum neque, vel commodo erat. Praesent placerat libero at nisl efficitur tristique. Vivamus id nulla a nibh euismod eleifend. Etiam malesuada lectus sit amet eros semper, at fringilla lorem malesuada. Curabitur faucibus pellentesque lacinia. This sums up "agile" well enough.
I used to use "Agile." Then I used "agile." Now I no longer use the word at all. It started as a principle, it endured as a buzzword, and it ended on the tailend of a fad.
Let's see, I went to a bunch of meetings, looked at incomplete and poorly written "stories" and I restarted my computer six times for no reason. No blockers, well, except this meeting.
Standup is for telling folks know what you're doing right now and what you might work on shortly. It's not a race, it's not a compeition, it's not a game. It's a brief nexus to coordinate, it's a place for a humble plea for help.
Points are silly. Work is not continuous. Teams are not uniform. Knowledge is not yet learned, expertise is not yet felt. Points are a desperate plea to commomiditize the so-called delivery of software. How many points did you do this sprint? More? Awesome. Less? Grossly unacceptable. The discussion of value and the exploration of problem and solution space, what's is important here. Points are not.
Who made these choices? Who are any of you? How could you do this? Let's find out.
It's not intellectual faffery, but it might as well be. It's when you decide that an interesting architecture matters more than the product in someone's hands or it even working. By all means, use your service discovery queue mesh distributed scalable serverless PaaS. But before you do, let's consider the facts.
You listen to customers. You build what they want. You build what they need. You keep chasing the dream. Suddenly, your system is broken and you have no where left to turn. What went wrong? Entropy begins and ends all things.
Right angles are boring. Break out of your four box. Creative outcomes come as a result of prime number increments.
We've got the product you've always wanted. All you have to do is believe. And don't do your research.