Cargo Cult Agile. Commentary on The Art of Agile Development's Stand-Up Meetings practice.
Back in the 40's, the story goes, American troops landed on a remote island. The natives of the island had never seen modern civilization before, and were amazed by the men and materials Allied forces brought by the island. They watched the troops set up an airstrip and a tower, don headphones, and call great metal birds filled with valuable Cargo down from the heavens. When the bird landed, shares of the Cargo were distributed to all of the islanders, bringing prosperity and comfort. One day, the troops left, and the great metal birds stopped arriving. Decades later, researchers found the island. *I first saw this story in the writings of Richard Feynman. Cargo Cult Agile The tragedy of the cargo cult is its adherence to the superficial, outward signs of some idea combined with ignorance of how that idea actually works. Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed. The 2001 agile manifesto was an attempt to replace rigid, process and management heavy, development methodologies with a more human and software-centric approach.
They identified that the programmer is the central actor in the creation of software, and that the best software grows and evolves organically in contact with its users. My first real contact with the ideas of agile software development came from reading Bob Martin’s book ‘Agile Software Development’. I still think it’s one of the best books about software I’ve read. It’s a tour-de-force survey of modern (at the time) techniques; a recipe book of how to create flexible but robust systems. What might surprise people familiar with how agile is currently understood, is that the majority of the book is about software engineering, not management practices. So what happened? Somehow, over the decade or so since the original agile manifesto, agile has come to mean ‘management agile’. What do you think of the agile method? - Production and Management.
The linked article can probably be best summed up by this line in the middle of their page: "Please don’t put non-technical managers in charge of software developers.
" Having a a disconnect between management and workers is always a problem. You ALWAYS need somebody in the middle who can speak both the management language and the worker language. In construction you often have a "working foreman" who is both a construction worker and knows their needs, and is also in management and can talk about costs and planning. In software it is best to have a project manager who can coordinate schedule milestones for the team and also coordinate business release dates and corporate deadlines. In both cases, these people must be smart enough to not confuse estimates with final delivery dates. Ashaman73, on 23 Jun 2014 - 11:45 AM, said: Estimates in Software Development. New Frontiers. Michael Dubakov , TargetProcess Founder May 14, 2013 There’s more and more buzz around estimates and #noestimates in software development.
People like to write bold statements and go extreme about things in blogs. Usually, personal dialogues are much more balanced. Some hate estimates and believe it’s a useless activity. Some defend it with arguments of arguable truth. Secrets of Quick Iteration in the Core Social Space. Plarium was founded in 2009, when casual games on social networks were at the peak of their popularity.
As long time game fanatics, the founders of Plarium -- myself included -- were excited to begin developing games driven by the growing demand on social platforms. We started out by developing applications such as a social poker platform for Russia and Eastern Europe, initially focusing on the social network VKontakte and then expanding to other sites such as Mail.Ru.
During this time, we understood that in order to become a global player in the gaming arena, we would have to create unique content. That's when we decided to create a new experience on social platforms and began developing hardcore, real-time strategy games with deep game play mechanics. Scrum & Kanban for Social Games. Always Multiply Your Estimates by π. Project estimation is a black art, nowhere more so than in game development.
I once heard of a mysterious cabal of numerologists that multiplied their time estimates by π. The practice allegedly gave them sufficient buffer for new requirements, testing, iteration, and other arcane changes in scope. This struck me as curious and arbitrary, but I was intrigued. I am now delighted to report that I have been able to put their Circular Estimation Conjecture on a firm mathematical footing. Allow me to explain. Someone — a designer, your lead, the exec producer, a friend, your mom — asks you to do something. But things change. And of course it didn’t all go smoothly. "Committing" to a Sprint and failing is a GOOD thing! What does it mean when a Scrum team “commits to a Sprint”?
There is a subtlety in the English language that leads to misinterpretation and misuse of the verb “to commit”. I have seen too many cases where a team is held accountable (“bad team, bad!”) Because they did not achieve their Sprint goal in some way.