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[Discuss] Agile software for a nacent project



On 07/12/2012 12:53 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> 
> I think "agile" development is probably the most abusive management
> technique ever devised. Sure, aspects of it are good software
> development processes, but the implementation is pretty exploitive, in
> my opinion. Every "agile" environment I have seen works the engineers to
> death. The "scrum" meetings are another form of micromanagement with the
> added benefit of peer coercion.
> 
> A few years back, a lot of people were excited, but today, I have yet to
> meet anyone that doesn't think "agile" is a meat grinder. It burns out
> good people and produces poor product quality.

Mark, we've had had this conversation before, and you have met me, so I
can safely say you're lying. I've been working in Agile environments for
years and I've never felt more empowered to say "no, we can't do that by
then".  I'm pretty sure the hundred-or-so people who show up to Agile
New England and Agile Boston meetings every month would agree.  I'm
sorry you had such a bad experience with what some idiots called Agile,
but if you were feeling like a slave, then it probably was not Agile.
Saying that you're "doing Agile"  when you're not is almost as common as
really "being Agile"

Normally I would say "Let's just agree to disagree", but I feel I have a
bit more of experience in this particular area than you, and I wish you
would stop trashing Agile when you've not actually done it.

> On 07/12/2012 12:16 PM, Doug wrote:
>> Does an agile development process make sense for projects that are all
>> volunteer based, with people who don't live in the same states or
>> countries?  In my job, we use greenhopper, part of www.atlassian.com
>> set of software.  There are morning scrum meetings, story sessions,
>> sprint planning and sprint completions.  That makes sense when
>> everyone drives to the same building.  For a volunteer based project,
>> those regular meetings are not going to be held.

- Geographically disparate team members is definitely a hindrance, but
not a show stopper, if you can counter with the right technologies, and
the time zone differences aren't too great.  Jira+Greenhopper is a great
start.  You'll need a wiki for persistent knowledge management, but I
assume if you have Greenhopper you already have Confluence, too.

- All-volunteer workforce is not really a problem at all.  In fact it
tends to be a bit less of a problem than some other practices, because
Agile teams often become meritocracies where good work is rewarded more
than seniority.  This is especially true if and when the team reaches
the stage of being self-organizing (people volunteer to work on stories
instead of being assigned them, and they do what's needed the most but
also what they enjoy)

Agile New England (which I'm on the Board of) has an event every year
called Agile Games, which is a 3-day conference.  All volunteers working
in their spare time.  But we have a backlog, we have weekly standups
over the phone instead of daily standups, We have retrospectives to make
sure we're doing things the best we can.

There are concessions you have to make in that environment, though.
We're not strictly following one flavor of Agile, but we are using a
complimentary and comprehensive set of practices that are Agile to the
best of our abilities; We communicate very frequently and freely, we
focus more on solving problems than placing blame (shared ownership of
the product), and we record the status of tasks so everyone knows where
everyone else stands.  We don't have sprints, but we do have milestones
that we associate with tasks and stories.

The biggest challenge is going to be frequent *but focused*
communication.  Lots of people need to interact in a way that
effectively conveys the information to the right people in a timely
manner without swamping people who don't need that information, ruining
the S/N ratio.

The way we do that in Agile New England (and in Agile Games) is to have
*lots* of mailing lists.  There's one list for all volunteers, and one
list for just the Board, then there's separate lists for each team:
marketing, sponsors, speakers, IS, hotel, finance....  Separate channels
means rapid communication with retained sanity.

>> I can imagine a planning board being of use.  "Look, here,
>> specifically is what we want done next."  That could be overkill
>> however, with say a newsgroup, twiki and github being sufficient.

Part of Agile practices is the balance of power, like the government
used to have.  And you can't have balance of power without interactive
planning.  So having the work all documented on the wiki is great, but
the planning itself needs to involve all involved parties.  A wiki can
sort of do that (as you do planning during a teleconference call,
someone updates the wiki and everyone else can refresh at will.  I've
come up with a specific table layouts in Foswiki that works well for us,
using some of its very advanced form/table tools, and that works well
for us.

Sadly, tools that do this very well are pretty expensive.  You can do it
in Greenhopper better than in a Wiki, but we don't have that option in ANE.

>> If you do think some aspects of the agile process make sense, what
>> software would you use?  I could pony up $20/month and use atlassian's
>> hosted service.  I don't think I will have 10 people who want to code
>> in a year, but one never knows.  If it does take off, then the costs
>> jump.

I personally would not use a service hosted on someone else's machine
simply because I am a privacy nut and I've seen too many companies
discontinue free services with no way to export your existing work.
Everything we do is hosted on a virtual web host (HostGator, who I
adore).  We don't have the ability to install Java, and that prevents us
from using certain tools.  Most everything we do use is Perl or PHP based.

There are free Agile planning tools out there.  We've found them
insufficient for our fairly complex needs, but you might find them
sufficient.  One of them is https://seenowdo.com/

>> The project of course involves quaternions, thinking about making
>> animation software using the multimedia Java platform known as
>> processing (http://processing.org/) for web sites and android phones.

Sounds cool!!



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