(2018-04-20) Jeffries The Agile Expanse

Ron Jeffries: The Agile Expanse. Scrum, LeSS, SAFe, … It’s all bullshit. There shouldn’t be any methods.* (branding)

I’ve pretty much convinced myself with the Dark Scrum series and related thinking, that those of us in the developer wing of “Agile” should turn our attention back to helping developers survive what “Agile” has become, rather than giving attention to pushing “Agile” per se. That’s hard to do, for me at least.

for developers to thrive, inside or under any method, the practices that started out as part of Extreme Programming, and that are implied by the notion of iterative and incremental software development, are still the foundation of the best way I know.

Regular delivery of working software allows the organization to learn to steer by scope control, and it gives us the best chance for a reality-based understanding of time and cost and hitting the date.

And working software, delivered on a regular cycle, requires that we learn to build in small slices, test as we go, and improve the design incrementally, using refactoring. To be sure that it does what was asked for, we need to learn to communicate with acceptance tests. To provide a continued smooth flow of development, we need to learn to work together via pair programming or mob programming. And so on.