Kerry Buckley

A post by Perryn Fowler reminded me of something I’d been meaning to say for a while. Perryn says:

agile is an adjective, not a noun

Saying ‘Agile Practices’ makes about as much sense as saying ‘Fast Running Shoes’.

Saying ‘Agile Best Practice’ makes about as much sense as ‘Fastest Running Shoes’.

It seems quite common (and I’m sure I’ve done it myself) to say you’re ‘doing’ agile. I think you can ‘do’ XP, Scrum or your methodology of choice, but agile has to be something you are.

So, how do you know if you are agile? I think it’s down to whether you believe in the manifesto, and more importantly whether you follow the principles.

[tags]agile[/tags]

We’ve nearly completed the process of handing responsibility for the internal system we’ve developed to an outsourced team, and I found this comment from our customer/user representative interesting:

“I have to spend so much of my time discussing how everything should work now. With the old team, I could just describe what we needed and I knew you’d understand what I meant and come up with a good solution.”

Let’s hope there’s enough continuity in the new team for them to build up a similar relationship. Of course, turnover of people (and hence depth of domain knowledge) is one more thing that you lose control of when you outsource a project.

I see Adewale Oshineye has posted some excellent photos from XP Day. Fortunately all you get to see of me is the back of my head (and hard as it may be to believe for those that know me, I’m not deliberately hiding my face in the second one!)

[tags]xpday[/tags]

Here are some notes from the recent (excellent) XP Day conference. This is based on my internal BT write-up, with a few company-specific bits removed.