Comments on: The Subtlety of People Over Process

By: cote

cote — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:09:50 +0000

Thanks for the corrections/updates!

By: Alistair Cockburn

Alistair Cockburn — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 02:25:26 +0000

/Muito obrigado/ for the kind words and good thoughts … just writing to fix a couple of broken URLs: the “Iterations” article has a ‘?’ (%3F) at the end:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Are_iterations_hazardous_to_your_project%3F (http://tinyurl.com/39wjul)

and the “dapper” picture is probably
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Image:Sepukkuface080.jpg (http://tinyurl.com/3ap4eq)

although this one might be a runner up:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Image:2003wildface.jpg (http://tinyurl.com/3ap4eq)

And yes, “Agile techniques, which started out with a commitment to pragmatism and empiricism over tradition and dogma have now become a dogma unto themselves.” … that seems indeed to be a common characteristic of people, to simplify and dogmatize /whatever/. Even if someone wrote in a holy testament, “Be kind to each other”, we’d find before long people slugging it out because how someone else was being kind didn’t fit their local dogma (… oh, that already all happened, oops…)

cheers - Alistair

By: Zane Rockenbaugh

Zane Rockenbaugh — Tue, 02 May 2006 23:23:30 +0000

Cockburn is awesome. And so dapper too. He’s the Red Irish to your Black, Cote!

By: Cote'

Cote' — Tue, 02 May 2006 21:05:52 +0000

I prefer the term “Scrum Lord,” coupled with the derogatory alternative, “Scum Lord.”
As with all things once they’re written down (like specific Agile implementations such as Scrum), it’s all to easy for doctrine-driven people to treat the printed word as The Logos. I’m not big on Logos-think. It goes pear-shaped quick. Indeed, I’ve had many exciting, late night conversations with Zane on the topic ;>
People in organizations, of course, are often eager to latch onto a set way of doing things. There’ve been countless times in the shops I’ve been in when someone has made an absurd statement like “we can’t choose not to have a retrospective, the retrospective is all about choosing what we do! And it’s required!”
So, yes, treating Agile like dogma is just dog-doo. I’ve butted my head against that dilemma many times. Once again, our man Cockburn has blazed the trail on this topic.
See my man Heraclitus…and never mind the mind-screw vortex in the statement “nothing endures but change [except the fact that nothing endures but change...ahhh!]“

By: Zane Rockenbaugh

Zane Rockenbaugh — Tue, 02 May 2006 13:59:17 +0000

Two points. First, it struck me as sad that Agile techniques, which started out with a commitment to pragmatism and empiricism over tradition and dogma have now become a dogma unto themselves. Certainly not with everyone, but with the majority, Agile in the mainstream is not a mindset and values (as we might have hoped) surplanting traditional techniques, but rather one dogma surplanting another. People yearn for and respond to dogma.

You mention yourself that Scrum and XP are retrospective within the process itself, but not, as far as I can see, of the process. It’s pretty clear that the preference of the industry is to “settle” on a process. There are good reasons for this. Those involved with the development of new methodologies, conciously or not, in turn exploit this tendency and seek to have “their thing” entrenched. Once you have an industry of “Scrum Captains”, then your flexibility to innovate within Scrum (or XP, etc.) is severly limited.

To some extent, XP and Scrum have become the “perpetual revolution” that, of course, isn’t. This is not a knock on XP and Scrum, or even their institutionalization. The fact is that something *has* to be institutionalized, and Agile is certainly an improvement. My point is that ‘perpetual revolution’ is a synonym for ’status quo’. XP, Scrum, and other ‘distilled’ Agile techniques have already happened.

To that point, I also found it a bit off that experience was given such primacy. Experience can help, but it can also be a hinderance. The key is whether the experience was introspective and reflective or merely rote. I would say that most people’s experience tends to be rote, and rather than lead to greater understanding, is simply ‘time invested in the status quo’, and thus antithetical to the kind of experience you’re talking about here.

Even making that distinction, however, reflective experience is useful, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. Indeed, my own experience, and I dare say your own, Cote, was one of people with almost *no* experience, who independently replicated many of the ideas of Agile development. Certain techniques were lacking, but we had a flat organization, transparent design, emphasis on communication, and constant customer consultations.

The experience/non-experience dimension is one in which value comes from both ends. Unique insight and fresh perspective are both valuable to process innovation.