about Agile in a sense

Delivering value is taken as read, everyone understands that if you’re not delivering value then the company’s not making a profit, and so they won’t have any money to pay you. If you want value you need to make sure not only that you understand what you’re doing but the guy who needs you to do it, or the people who need you to do, do too.

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 found another job with an investment bank - after about a month and a half there they told me that they were letting me go. A number of people were being let go at the time from their contract, but they told me they were doing it because I didn’t test my code thoroughly enough. I was a bit angry about that at the time, because I thought that I did test my code. I know I test my code and I was one of the better people on that project in terms of just getting things tested. But I also took ownership of more bugs than anybody else. I was the only person on the team that was unit testing. I’ve