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Waterfalling down the Staircase
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For those who haven't been watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix, the last episode of Season 1 includes a resounding lesson about the difference between Waterfall and Agile. (It would be great if someone with more video savvy than me were to capture the clip and link to it here.) The Staircase Project is the old Project Orion concept reimagined to send a probe to recon an alien enemy fleet many light years away. Without going into spoilers, the basic idea is to accelerate a probe with an EM sail to near light speed by shooting it past 300 nuclear bombs, each to be exploded at just the right moment to blast it with radiation. This is a purely ballistic launch: the probe has no power or steering capabilities, so the explosions have to be timed perfectly and the trajectory is locked in. Sounding familiar? Early on, the shock of an explosion disconnects one of the tethers connecting the probe to the sail, the probe goes off course, and the entire project is lost - a world-threatening catastrophe. It would not have been rocket science to give the probe the minimal intelligence and power to adjust its trajectory, perhaps by "trimming" the sail with a tug on one of its many tethers. But no: the finest minds on earth agree it's necessary to lock the trajectory in up front. (Disclaimer - I've read only the first book in the trilogy on which the series is based, which ends before the probe project is undertaken, so I don't know if the author, Liu Cixin, is responsible for the waterfall.)
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rossentj@...
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Hey, it's me again -- collecting real-world input for another article about Agile
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You know me and my Hive Mind stories. The last time I did something like this it turned into “Why your users hate Agile development (and what you can do about it)" https://www.computerworld.com/article/2828949/why-your-users-hate-agile-development--and-what-you-can-do-about-it-.html Now I’m working on an article about Agile development (for a new-to-me tech magazine), and I’d like your input. In short: Tell me what FAKE AGILE looks like. The story’s working title is “How to Recognize ‘Fake Agile’ Development” or “You Thought Agile Development Failed You. Turns Out You Weren’t Actually Doing Agile.” My premise is that some companies claimed to adopt Agile — but in reality they dressed up hidebound old development practices with a new label. And they present this as “Agile failed.” I want real practitioners to talk about recognizing “fake” Agile, the disservice it’s doing to software development processes, and what people should do to counter it. For instance, in the discussion that inspired this article, one friend wrote that large companies love sprints and ‘stand-ups’ that are really just status meetings. But despite their lip service to agile, they regularly deliver systems that are not what the customer wants. Another said, “One of the clients I worked on used SAFe and just… ugh, if I never have to go through PI planning again that’ll be just fine with me, from what I can see SAFe is just three waterfalls in a trenchcoat.” At the end of Frank Zappa’s song “Cosmic Debris” he asks, "Now is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?” I aim to recognize the “real” thing and separate it from ersatz claims. And to give actionable advice to the people who aim to do it right. (This isn’t a pure Agile fanfest, mind you; I encourage acknowledgements of the methodology’s imperfections.) I hope you can answer: · What have you seen called “Agile” that isn’t? · What did they do, and what did they think they were doing? · What should they have been doing instead? What can be done to counter it, and who should be doing that? · Let me know if I can quote you directly (by name, role/title, company) or indirectly (“a software developer at a Midwest insurance firm”). I prefer the former but I’m okay with the latter. I like to think that this will spark a conversation (It’s been too long, folks) but I’m fine with private messages. —Esther
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Esther
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Staff Eng / XP Coach position
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Hey folks, The recent thread reminded me that this group exists. :-) I hope you don't mind my sharing that I joined a late-stage startup as VP of Eng last year. Now for the best part: **I'm hiring multiple Staff Engineers / XP coaches** to help me transition the company to XP. We're also using FaST (Fluid Scaling Technology) Here's the deets: OpenSesame | Staff Engineer (XP Coach) | REMOTE (US or Latam) | FULL-TIME We're an eLearning marketplace and late-stage startup. We have about 65 engineers that are going all in on Extreme Programming (XP) and Fluid Scaling Technology (FaST). We need multiple Staff Engineers with experience in XP practices—such as test-driven development, continuous deployment, and evolutionary design—who will help improve the skills of engineers across the organization. You'll act as a hands-on player-coach who leads by example to teach and mentor the engineers you work with. You'll come up to speed quickly in an unfamiliar codebase, identify challenges, and coach team members in addressing them. You'll work as a leader in a team of Staff and Principal engineers to spread XP skills throughout the organization, as well as working with me (VP Eng) to define skill development strategy. We primarily work in TypeScript / Node / React, but we also have a large PHP / Drupal legacy codebase that you'll be helping us retire. If you apply for this job and have extensive XP experience—and if you're on this list, you probably do!—email me off-list with an explanation of your background so I can give your interview priority. Cheers, James -- James Shore - The Art of Agile voice: +1 503-267-5490 blog: jamesshore.com
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Jim Shore
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Kent Beck's Substack - discount through Sunday Jan 14
https://open.substack.com/pub/tidyfirst/p/i-learn-a-surprising-lesson-about Being happily retired this won't be useful to me professionally, but I still enjoy reading Ken's work. Besides, I derived so much value from XP, TDD, and xUnit over the years that I'm delighted to contribute even if I never find the time to read.
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Adam Wildavsky
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Remote Pair Programming
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What's the state of the art on this? We may need to try it more often going forward! I'm joining a remote hackathon this weekend and would love to be able to pair effectively.
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Adam Wildavsky
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Introducing XP to CS undergrads
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I've agreed to give a talk to a class of CS Majors, all college juniors, divided into two 50-minute segments with a short break between. My inclination is to do what I've done in the past for working engineers, briefly describe XP and its core practices and then use a rough Planning Game to ask which two or three practices they'd like to learn more about. I'll try to steer them toward TDD, since that's the one I've gotten the most mileage from, but it'll be up to them. I'll crib the list of practices from Ron Jeffries' site: https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/what-is-extreme-programming/ Any thoughts? I'm calling myself retired, so I have only an approximate idea of the state of the art in Software Engineering. My impression is that some XP practices are now mainstream, others not so much.
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Adam Wildavsky
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SRP vs SOC
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Hi fellow programmers Non native English speaker here, so thanks for points about answer 3. I get the below question quite often in my clean code refactoring OR agile developer trainings after introducing principles: "What is the difference between SOC (Separation of Concerns) and SRP (Single Responsibility Principle)?" My answer has grown in the direction of 3 things: Timing when do you think about this principle in the back of your mind? SOC more as a process during design and problem decomposition (slicing) SRP more after the fact, when the code/system exists (What is this package responsible for) Flight level of the principle SRP is about things and their behavior Things being functions, classes, packages, namespaces, modules, SOC could be applied within a function (Is the concern of "x" clearly visible and separated) OR on an architecture level (Where is the concern of "y" handled?) The terms "responsibility" VS "concern" "responsibility" reminds me of OO (see flight levels) "concern" could be anything in my language world: activity, task, goal, responsibility, request, pure... It's more about "where is this concern visible or delegatable to" What would you answer to "SRP vs SOC"? Thanks!!! Peter Gfader
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Peter Gfader
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Process vs. self-discipline [was: Sacking Jira]
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(I'm not making a statement about Steve's post here; rather, it inspired a different question) This is related to something I've been slowly coming to believe over the years. One of the widespread misconceptions about XP (and, to a somewhat lesser extent about Agile in general) is that it's a rejection of discipline in favor of simply letting developers do as they please. I view it as substituting self-discipline for externally imposed discipline; this is the meaning to me (or at least one of the meanings) of the phrase "People over process". The notion that discipline _must_ be externally imposed, or it won't exist at all, is built into the mindset of the various MBA/PMP curricula, and into that of many businesses. I suspect this misconception is responsible for the widespread popularity of Scrum and the prevalence of Fake Agile over the real thing. Scrum gives folks with that mindset something which they can latch onto as an externally imposed process, while simultaneously "being agile", at least in name. Thoughts? -John -- John Maxwell KB3VLL jmax@...
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John Maxwell
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Has Extreme Programming forgotten about Operations?
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A few weeks ago I held a meetup about DevOps. Instead of giving a presentation, I stimulated a debate with the audience present, presenting several hypotheses to discuss and possibly refute. Very provocatively, my hypothesis was that DevOps did not invent anything new :D To summarize a lot, I believe DevOps rode the wave of the emerging cloud universe, bringing attention to a whole set of practices and tools that cannot be ignored today. Those who manage complex infrastructures can no longer afford to do it by hand, in many cases to date it is simply impossible to do so. That said, I continue to believe that DevOps has "simply" taken up (and brought back into fashion) concepts from Lean, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and eXtreme of Programming of course. I come to the point, which is then the title of this post :) What were Operations like in the days of the C3 Project? I get the impression that XP was very little concerned with Operations, and I am curious to understand why: Were Development and Operations worlds totally separate? Was it not of "strategic" interest? Wasn't Operations simply an issue at the time? Or am I simply missing something? I am curious to have the opinion and listen to the stories from the pioneers listening :) Thank you! Ferdinando
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Ferdinando Santacroce
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Research on service-based architectures
Hello everyone 👋 We're researching service-based architectures (e.g., microservices, SOA). We would be grateful for your help if you have some experience with such systems. Here's the link to our survey: https://rebrand.ly/CharM/surveysflu0h0 We hope you can learn something about service-based systems in the first part (~17min video), and we'll ask you a few questions in the second part (~15min). We'll openly share our conclusions with anyone interested. Thank you! Filipe
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Filipe Correia
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Ward Cunningham interviews from 2008 and 2016
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I'm a podcast addict. I listen to these regularly, but sometime it takes me quite a while to share! https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/27 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/239 Sent via Superhuman
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Adam Wildavsky
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Hi Group I am playing around with the concept of Nullable Infrastructure and Embedded Stub http://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2018/testing-without-mocks#nullable-infrastructure Thanks James for publishing this. I really enjoyed it! Could be a question to James but maybe someone else has also a good tips for the below: Where would you put the createNull() method? 1. on the interface? 2. on 1 of the implementations of the interface? createNull() would create this class "NotificationPort" that does nothing. Or am I missing here something bigger? THANKS for help! Yes, the code is a total over engineered piece to teach different concepts :) Any feedback is appreciated Peter Gfader
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Peter Gfader
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Hello practitioners and Thanks for the concerns Steve. I think there is another question sitting in the thread below about "Deployed" and "Released". That's why I start a new thread. >> Under this single team concept, where are the potentially many stakeholders, including users, customers, money people, executives, marketing, sales, IT, guardians of data and architectural standards, documentors, trainers, customer support and customer service? Part of the team, really? If not, does the team ignore them? If the team does not ignore them, doesn't liaising dominate the PO job in any but the smallest organizations? I think the question is: "How does the Scrum Product Owner accountability work with multiple teams working on 1 product?" (and lots of influencers, providers, ❤ lovers of the product = stakeholders) Note: Multiple products & multiple teams = Good, you have lots of options. I don't know the best one since its so product specific (just software? SAAS? hardware products? medical devices with embedded software? ...) Multiple products & 1 team = Ughh... Tricky (Think about your definition of "Product") 1 product & 1 team = easiest situation I guess out of the 4 Focus here: 1 product & multiple teams Every Scaling Framework has their own opinion on this. My experience by coaching teams and my opinion strongly influenced by me being a ScrumOrg Trainer and teaching Nexus: There is 1 Product Owner for 1 Product (SAFe and others say something different) I have seen this work well with 3-6 teams (although there is evidence that it seems to work with larger amount of teams) 1 Product Owner with x teams needs to "scale" her work She is not able to talk to the developers on a daily basis anymore She is not able to talk to the millions of users anymore She is not able to discuss with everyone in a face2face session about upcoming features or ideas PS SAFe has a Team Product Owner which is a strong 'smell' to me. More details here http://remove-scrum-from-safe.tilda.ws/PO What have you seen working (or not) in a scenario where you have 1 Product Owner and 1 Product and X teams and Y stakeholders? Looking forward to experiences! THANKS Peter Gfader ---- A bit of context below ---- Major problems I observed with different orgs: Trust in the development teams to enable them to deploy when they feel like Technical excellence to make this (which relates to 1.trust) interruption free (0 downtime) stress free (test harness) learning in Production (observability) What usually works easily: Trust in the Product Owners to take the responsibility of "Release" (when the Product Owner feels like it's a good moment, based on external events or data) I have written these things up on my blog here https://beyond-agility.com/deployment-vs-release/ and a whitepaper with feedback from Jez.
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Peter Gfader
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I’ve been immersed in the world of scrum for the last few years and need to dust off my XP knowledge. What books or videos do you feel are worth the time? Kind regards Elle
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Elle Fitz
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Companies or teams following extreme programming
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Since 2014, I've had the privilege of working with Pivotal and its evolved form of extreme programming. I love the collaboration and power of pair programming. I've done several academic papers and am currently working on a book about it. I'm curious if you know of any other groups or companies following extreme programming. Thanks! Todd Sedano
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Todd Sedano
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A book about
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#xp
Does anybody know where i can find a new book related with xp... or xp being replaced by scrum in many organization?
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ridi_fx
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Open source ensemble working
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Hello people! Thought I'd share a blog post I wrote about something dear to me - ensemble working* in open source. Hope you like it and spread the concept! https://proagile.se/blog/open-source-ensemble-it-works Has anyone else tried this out? I'd love to update the post with more examples 😊 /Olof *Me and Emily Bache started using this alternative, less hostile wording of mob programming last year after discussions with e.g Jeff Langr ( who's here on this list ). I think recent world events underlines the need to use a different expression even more; mob isn't a fair word to use for something as civil as ensemble working.
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Olof Bjarnason
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Soak Time
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I wrote a book about what one person is doing in the corner while everyone else is Mob Programming: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14yGrtU8ma4bYurFHfxEsi73lvJICSALxOT-EzahNQxs/edit -- Phlip http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ZeekLand
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Phlip
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Ted Lasso
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I watched a lot more TV than usual during the pandemic. And my usual consists only of "Silicon Valley" on HBO. Of everything I saw in 2020, my favorite was "Ted Lasso" on Apple TV. The premise is unusual, perhaps absurd - it's about an American football coach brought in to coach an English Premier League soccer team. After thinking about it for a while I realized that its lessons for sports coaching could apply to XP coaching as well. I'm retired and not planning to get back into coaching but I'd love to hear from anyone who tries an approach like Ted's. And regardless of whether it applies to XP or Agile, I recommend it as a fun and entertaining show. I have to warn you, though - it's upbeat.
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Adam Wildavsky
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