Agile Otter Blog

For all the 'take back agile" and "agile smagile" and "apologizing for agile" and all the other post-agilists and so-called post-agilists in the world, I give you Otter's law: Any methodology followed via obligation and knowledge-avoidance cannot produce positive change.  I've ranted about change gone wrong and methodologies followed badly and horrible oversales and undersales and all, but it comes down to otter's law ultimately. Too many companies have huge gains from using XP and Scrum and what-have-you. Too many others tried "the same thing" with entirely different results. Some teams are whole-heartedly into the whole agile thing, and they seem to have pretty good. Others don't seem very excited and don't get much out of it. Is it excitement that they need? I don't think so. I think that the lack of excitement and the lack of progress have the same root. I think it's a lack of profluence in agile-a...

I'm not a big scrum promoter, but I am VERY familiar with scrum and have coached many teams and always been able to improve their success with the method to some extent. I've taught scrum. I don't have to love scrum (not more than XP for certain!) to see that it's getting a bad rap. Ignoring advice to "never blog angry" I'm going to let the grumpy old man out for a minute, in hopes you'll hear what he has to say.  Suggestion:  Before railing on how scrum doesn't work  you should be sure that what you're doing is scrum. Some people say they're doing scrum because they have planning meetings, morning status meetings, and sometimes have reviews or retrospectives. But they're not sure why they're doing them, and these meetings just take time away from what would otherwise be potentially productive programming and testing time. So, let's get back to the basics here. Scrum is entirely based on transparency , inspection , a...