Developing Software Together

I already wrote quite a few things about estimation in this blog. But this is only a part of the picture.

Now, I want to collect some thoughts about software development. This page collects all the blog posts in this category.

Throughout my career, I tried to create some products (Books, courses, video tutorials, software). Most of them failed, especially the ones in the early years. They failed in a really un-spectacular way: People were not even interested in them.

And I think the ones that failed, failed because I wanted to finish them before showing them to anybody.

At conferences (and when talking to others), I often hear discussions about specific agile methodologies.

About the relative merits of extreme programming vs Srcum. About how SAFe is not actually agile (or why it is agile). About whether Kanban is agile or lean or both or none of the above.

Yesterday, I got dragged into a #NoEstimates discussion on Twitter again. It was a mistake: I really dislike how those discussions usually unfold. With all their half-truths and over-simplifications and attacking straw men and the passive-aggressiveness, most turn basically into a flame war. I think we need a more nuanced discussion, if we even need that discussion at all.

But I could not stop thinking about that discussion. So, here’s another blog about Estimates and other stuff…

Suddenly, in a large company that has been around for a very long time, the C-Level executives realize that something must change. Smaller, younger companies are out-competing them.

“Everyone else is doing this Agile thing. So we have to become agile too. From now on, we will all do Scrum!” (Or Kanban. Or SAFe. Whatever.)

Some days ago I tweetet…

Do (some of) your developers hate Agile? You need technical AND management coaching. Contact me - I can help, or connect you to people...

— David Tanzer (@dtanzer) 16. Mai 2017

Why do developers hate Agile? Allan Kelly has a theory, and according to him, it mostly boils down to three reasons:

I was fascinated with agile software development from the moment I first heard about it in an eXtreme Programming course at University. And when I was a developer in a Scrum team for the first time, I decided that I have to become involved in this “agile” thing / community.

Because of that moment almost 10 years ago, I started to learn more about Scrum, Kanban, Software Craftsmanship and other “agile” stuff. Because of that moment, I write on this blog, give conference talks and try to help people become better at developing software.

So, your Scrum Master (or product owner or some line manager) is out of office. She cancels the daily standup meeting, a.k.a “Daily Scrum”. Did that ever happen to you? Does it happen all the time? If yes, stop doing daily standup meetings. Yes, completely stop them.

You are not doing the daily standup meeting for the team. When it gets cancelled because a certain person is not there, you are doing the meeting for that person. There might be several reasons why this is happening:

This article is part of the series Your Company Will Never Be Agile. It is a case study about a company that successfully introduced devops to a big team.

This article is the second part of the series Your Company Will Never Be Agile. The previous part is Organizational Structure Prevents Companies from Becoming Agile.

Imagine you are a manager in a company that has annual budgets and bonus systems. A team that you are responsible for wants to work in a truly agile fashion (self-organized, re-planning every 2 weeks, working with emerging requirements, …). Do you allow them to do it? Under which conditions do you allow them to?