Post-agilism (p&p, day 2)

The Agile forest for the Agile trees: too much attention to individual practices than understanding the broad principles; form over substance

Sounds like the difference between "Agile Tragedy" and "Agile Comedy" is communication, practically an encounter session. Telling truths, even when difficult. Bi-directional.

Aha: Agile is about trust, building it, maintaining it, specifically earning it.

Zen agile, neo-agile, postagile... can jettison all 12+ practices and still be little-a agile

Shared understanding of what "done-done" looks like
Empowered, own the problem, it is the team's to suck or shine
Incremental understanding; learn as you go about all aspects of what's going on (including each other, the business area, the customer, etc.)... must accept that you don't know up-front... must seek to learn continuously

Warning signs

• Silent team room
• Afraid to change existing code
• Customer unavailable
• Don't ship frequently

When off-track

• Talk talk talk (yay!!)
• Ask how we'll solve the problem(s) together
• Guide, don't bully (oops)
• Gotta listen, too (hmm)
  

Pair programming reduces context-switching costs: much less likely to interrupt and distract two people who are engaged in an activity than one person when you don't know what they're doing. Context cop(s) important, take (kick) side chatter out of the room... then can be a noisy vigorous team room but will be focused and happy

"Let's say you have an agile team, and you have team members who don't want to be agile. You can't fire them, and you can't promote them. Where can you put them to minimize the damage?" (Ted rules!) It's better to bring them into the team, but if you can't, then you've either got to figure out how to be a team without them, or just don't do the hyper-team thing at all, which is a valid option.

Peter Provost rules!