Agile Notes

Any company that thinks of itself as a real company has a Human Resource department. Any HR department wants to measure it employees in order to establish salary ranges, incentive programs and so on. So far none has realized and far less understood that software development in general and in an Agile environment specifically is team work and not easilly mapped onto a sales guys metrics.

What to do when there is no Product Owner present and you dont have a prioritized backlog? What about the project running wild? We need this and that and those bafoons at marketing that wants that Macromedia Installer are crazy? What if it breaks and installs our product wrongly - we think this is a top priority for the project to develop an in-house patcher/installer so that we dont have to buy that expensive MacroMedia thing. And the CRM in it that they want they surely dont know what they want and besides it cant be that important?

Aaargh - tools! Cant live with'em cant live without 'em. This truly is a topic that can get me going. It has so many dimensions but lets start with the folliest of follies - inhouse tool development. Brrr - I bet most has been directly involved or seen it either consume resources wildly or decay into uselessness. So what happens - some one has a great idea. Sure but then you do it as a skunk work and since its not core to the business you never ever get time and resources to make it even remotly done. So you end up with a piece of code that has expectations, since its been talked about for ages and the idea is great so the outcome has to even better. But it never gets there and eventually it will decay into worthlessness. The only good thing with this is that there hasnt been a serious consumption on resources to produce - well nothing :-) The other scenario is even worse in my opinion - you actually make a product/project out of the inhouse tool. But since it isnt core busin...