Re: [extremeprogramming] ...and we're back!

Now this gives me some hope. A few years ago, one of our VPs announced that the organization was going Agile. I’d been pushing TDD for years with mixed success; the PMs had noticed that our group, which used it, was much more productive than the other groups, which didn’t, but as we were geographically separated, it was very hard for me to mentor the others - and now, we were getting executive support!

But as John notes, what was imposed was a far cry from what most of us thought of as agile. Upper management declared that we were no longer organized in management teams, but rather in scrum teams, and the managers were renamed as scrum masters. The PMs were henceforth to be called product owners, and would attend our weekly status meetings, which would now be held every day and called scrum stand-ups. All of our work was to be listed as taks in JIRA. Oh, and one hard rule was that all members of a scrum team had to be within five time zones of another.

I pointed out to my manager (now the new VP) that what were were doing wasn’t even scrum, much less agile, but he assured me that we would somehow get better at it. Spoiler: we haven’t. I have managed to persuade my new team that unit tests are important, and now most developers make it a point to write them… once they have the code working.

I work remotely these days, and have found it much harder to teach TDD that way; I used to be able to wander to a colleague’s desk or invite him to mine to say, look at this. That problem you’re having? Have you tried this kind of approach? Or even, come sit with me and tell me what you think. That’s a lot harder to do over Slack or Zoom.

I hope to hear what you guys have figured out. 

> On Oct 29, 2019, at 4:48 PM, john.carter via Groups.Io <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for doing this!
> 
> The old group faded and died as we all got stuck in doing XP'ish stuff, getting things done......
> 
> ...and then out of left field came that flavour of Agile called Scrum, which I initially welcomed with open arms..... only to find something had gone terribly terribly wrong between XP and the variant of Scrum that got coughed up on my door step.
> 
> So many times in the past few years I have lamented that Scrum somehow manage to take XP and leave all the Good Bits out of it....
> 
> Hopefully we help can steer the world back on to a better course again.
> 
> Certainly I learnt a lot from the old incarnation of this group, and have learnt a lot since then. 
> 
> I look forward to learning again!


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