I took a break from engineering and leadership about 6 years ago to give Agile Coaching a try. The prospect of solving the greatest problem in software development intrigued me. The problem being: how we work together. I learned a lot in the military about servant leadership, about pushing decisions down to the lowest level, empowered teams, and reacting dynamically to a changing environment.
“Agile” unfortunately is nothing more than a knee jerk reaction to the problems in project management that came before it. There are no “first principles”. I’ve been planning a conference talk on this for a while but I don’t know where to give it.
Everything in Agile is anecdotal, secrets of success, dogma and religion (they even call things ceremonies!).
What I want, and what I think we deserve is a first principles based approach to how work together. There are enough fields of study surrounding how people work together to make software that I believe we could uncover a set of laws or testable axioms. Just consider the following areas of science that effect how people work together and build systems: computer science, positive psychology, group psychology, semiotics, information theory, complexity, human computer interaction… the list goes on.
What we need is more science, reason, and principles, less dogma, religion and manifestos.
I took a break from engineering and leadership about 6 years ago to give Agile Coaching a try. The prospect of solving the greatest problem in software development intrigued me. The problem being: how we work together. I learned a lot in the military about servant leadership, about pushing decisions down to the lowest level, empowered teams, and reacting dynamically to a changing environment.
“Agile” unfortunately is nothing more than a knee jerk reaction to the problems in project management that came before it. There are no “first principles”. I’ve been planning a conference talk on this for a while but I don’t know where to give it.
Everything in Agile is anecdotal, secrets of success, dogma and religion (they even call things ceremonies!). What I want, and what I think we deserve is a first principles based approach to how work together. There are enough fields of study surrounding how people work together to make software that I believe we could uncover a set of laws or testable axioms. Just consider the following areas of science that effect how people work together and build systems: computer science, positive psychology, group psychology, semiotics, information theory, complexity, human computer interaction… the list goes on.
What we need is more science, reason, and principles, less dogma, religion and manifestos.