For me, lots of projects have some degree of grind or frustration or irritation. There’s not one project I could point to and say that was just delicious through and through. I think Agile sets out to solve a big bunch of problems, but I think there’s something underlying that set of problems. There’s something about western culture that trains them not to do certain things. If I do something that of that smell or feel, there’ll be a big wrongness coming my way. People slowly learn not to do certain things.

Yeah, we did one self-organising project, we were working under the mantra of better software faster. The idea was quality and speed, better software faster, yeah, brill. I would reckon we could double the speed just by going faster. The theory was that we could get twice the performance out of the team by doing it faster, just by sorting out all the little problems.

It’s just a basic engineering problem. When you have more than one person working on the team they will end up making changes in the same file, use the same function, or in another object using another object in a critical way. And things are going break unless they are disciplined in their approach. I think this is a problem that basically generally people haven’t got a clue how to share code. That’s what we had there. A usual thing was that someone would stand up and go, “Okay, who’s changed such and such?” with, you know, “You Muppet” going unsaid.

I remember they pretty much set the pace for my whole seven years there more or less. They were quite established in what they thought was good design and good practice. The engineers that is, not the management team at all, the engineers… So I did my design one way and I named my stuff one way and they were like “Well, it shouldn’t be named like that.” We’d just end up having a huge argument about what things were called; and then we’d have these arguments about design and everything else…