(2019-05-03) Jeffries Agile Twelve

Ron Jeffries: It came to pass that in those days, Kent Beck said that when he defined XP, he took some good practices and turned the dials up to eleven (WikiWikiWeb:GoesToEleven). Looking at the Agile Manifesto, it seems to me and to Chet Hendrickson that folks often don't even turn the dials up to seven... At some point, Chet mentioned Al Smith's saying that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy, and we suspect that the cure for the evils of "Dark Agile" would be more Real Agile™️. So what if we turned the dials to Twelve™️?

Agile is about building working software in response to changing requirements. But a backlog often gives the team a long list of "must do", eliminating changing direction based on current understanding. With dials to Twelve™️, we "simply" build a continuous flow of working software. With everyone on the Team, we decide all the time, what to build next. We're ready to let people use the software at all times. We deliver continuously.

Scrum calls for the product team to contain "all the skills" needed to product the product, and that's good. The Twelve™️ viewpoint calls us to dial that notion all the way up to 12, in particular for the Product Owner... From the Twelve viewpoint, there is no powerful decision maker in what to do, how to do it, what the architecture should be, whether something is a bug or not. It's all about the Complete Team. Conventional management often wants an individual "in charge", to be "held responsible". A more modern, sensible, Real Agile™️ viewpoint is that we build systems of people with Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose, and we guide the systems to get the results that we want. That's really what the words "self-organization" mean in the Agile Manifesto, and at that time, I believe none of us saw how far that notion could, and should, go.