“That is, while the items on the left sound nice
in theory, we’re an enterprise company, and there’s
no way we’re letting go of the items on the right.”
http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/
Not mine but this resonates strongly with my experiences. I’ve seen varying levels of agile interpretation including this during my career so far. (By contrast, the team closest to the original principles that I worked with hadn’t even given their working practices and culture a name.)
The sad fact is that it’s all too easy to fall into the checkbook agile, control & distrust trap in large organizations. What I like about this spoof is that it captures Ron Jeffries thinking from this article in a concrete and direct way that even the most disconnected exec should recognize what their teams are doing wrong.
It also uses a subtle but powerful tool that makes this worth paying attention to rather than just reading, chuckling and inwardly despairing.
In trying to understand what you should do it’s important to understand what you should not do. The original manifesto is vague. Many of the myths that cause execs to distrust agile when they first read the manifesto are made manifest due to its vagueness. Similarly, developers that see a get out of jail free card on having to do anything but cut code in the manifesto are able to do so.
The negative ad-libs at the end of each point in this cynical version provide a clear “bad” marker; a new, tangible triangulation point to avoid.
What we need are equivalent “good” triangulation points based on business reality for large-scale software development rather than a noble vision so that we can help our teams and managers do the right thing.
About The Captain
Captain Crom started programming and debugging games from magazines on his Brother’s BBC as a small boy in the early 1980s. With early qualifications in both computer science & art and a love of live music it became clear he was destined for bad things.
His tyrannical ways commenced with a degree in Computing & Informatics at Plymouth and from the mid 1990's a career in the software industry. After formative years as "The Scourge of the Thames Valley" between Reading and Bracknell with occasional raids on the San Francisco Bay area, since 2004 he has been seen sailing stretches of the A10 North and South of the Isle of Ely with the primary source of his raids targeted around Cambridge. Sightings have also been rumored as far afield as Scotland, Norway, India, Nevada, Florida and Georgia.
The Captain has served in companies ranging from successful startups and ailing dot-coms to global corporations, spanning roles from IT, consulting, support, development and management through to agile coaching.
The common thread in each of his roles is that he has always chosen to join software product groups - usually large-scale enterprise software. His large-scale product and organizational focus differentiates him from the more common textbook agile captains.
(Other differentiators include his distinctive hoop earrings and love of spiced rum)
The Captain's Agile experience started with a blend of FDD and XP in what he describes as "the most disciplined team he had ever served with". He subsequently moved onto using Scrum and XP blended with Theory Of Constraints, Kanban and Lean philosophies to improve software delivery techniques in other organizations.
He believes every member of a delivery team should spend time with customers supporting the product they produced. “Sitting at the dirty end of a product (or cutlass) completely changes the way you think about business processes and write software for the rest of your softwarefaring career!”
