(2022-01-13) Jeffries Strawberries1

Ron Jeffries: Strawberries 1. It’s not the method. It’s not the framework. It’s your unique assemblage of innumerable small things that work together toward success. And some larger things: the people.

This is, however the first article where I’ve committed to this particular direction: focusing on the small, solid ideas that contribute to what we call success in software development.

“Agile” is not delivering what its creators and early adherents feel that it should. Instead, “Agile” has turned into a world of process products and tool products, and is not delivering the effectiveness the creators and adherents know to be possible

The authors and early adherents had all had a similar experience of working in an incremental and iterative fashion, following some practices that are more or less easy to describe, and we had all experienced success and joy in the work. Perhaps we can be forgiven for thinking that the common elements we observed were central to the success and joy. I’ve come to see–am coming to see–that they were not.

It was the team, which by some magic, had come together, and who worked together, co-creating the product.

That team did, of course, follow a process that probably looked like Scrum or XP.

They did all those things, and most of those things are what we’ll call “strawberries” in this series.

At the beginning of this Agile thing, and here I do not put quotes around it, we thought that it was the assembly of these ideas into a coherent framework that mattered, and we created XP ad Scrum and Crystal. (agile software development)

I had imagined that the world would be a better place because of what we were doing. Well, in fact, it is a better place. It’s just not as better as I had imagined.

let’s have another Jerry Weinbergism: Things are the way they are because they got that way

This series is about the future

the common notion behind Heart and Modern is–I believe–to bring “Agile” back toward Agile, with a focus on essentials.

It is my personal view that an important part of what has “gone wrong” with “Agile” is branding. It started with picking a desirable term like “agile” as part of the name, it continued with XP and Scrum, it worsened with DaD and SAFe, and it continues with Heart and Modern.

But all that’s by the way. I’m here to talk about Strawberries.

The Strawberries idea is to find the “strawberries”, the ideas that are solid enough that they almost cannot be watered down or spread thinly. Some of these may be solid enough to be defined as “practices”, but some may fall more into the realm of values and principles.

Curiously, the Agile Manifesto is about values and principles. Too often, the packaged frameworks have lost sight of the very values and principles that should be central to them. Here, in this series, we’ll surely come back to the V’s and P’s often.

What Are SOME Strawberries?

Retrospectives

Planning: there should be a tighter bond between Retro N and Planning N+1 than between Planning N and Retro N. Planning works best in the clear light of experience

Brackets: This idea comes from Twelve, the “method” that Chet and I wrote about ((2019-09-16) Jeffries Twelve Talk)

Complete Team (Whole Team)

knowledge, management knowledge, development/testing knowledge, …, everyone we need. Everyone

Diversity

ensure that our teams have all the ideas they need, and the flip side, which is to ensure that all the people with ideas have a fair chance to be on the team.

Frequent Delivery

I’m sure that an essential Strawberry is to have, at every moment from the beginning of the effort, a complete, tested, running version of the product (increment)

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