The Agile Executive

Cote has captured my reflections on Agile Roots in the podcast entitled Agile Roots, Agile Operations & Agile Clouds. This post highlights a few nuggets not covered in the interview, as follows:

• Attendance in the conference (>200 folks) was driven only by word of mouth.
• If you ever hear the old excuse “This feature cannot be decomposed to fit in the iteration,” send the person saying so to Alistair Cockburn’s workshop Nano-Incremental Development, a.k.a. Elephant Carpaccio. Amazing what can be squeezed into a nine-minute iteration!
• The nine-minute limit on iteration length might seem artificial. However, as part of his workshop, Alistair indicated top programmers tend to break the tasks they are working on to slices no longer than thirty minutes.
• According to Jeff Patton, Jim Highsmith has recently revised his quip “Barely sufficient process” to “Barely sufficient is too much.”
• Sue Mckinney indicated average size of the development team at IBM’s Software Group has dropped from 500 to 50 over the past few years.
• Reece Newman pointed out that both Brian Marick and I are actually talking about a social contract for Agile. Brian in his response to the question “”If anarcho-syndicalism was crushed during the 1920’s in the United States and its principles inspired the Agile Manifesto as well as Agile software development, why hasn’t the Agile movement been crushed?”  Me in the post A Social Contract for Agile. To quote Reece:

Although the content of the Social Contract in Brian’s answer differs from your Social Contract for Agile, the idea of a Social Contract is present in both your blog and Brian’s answer.

• Brian Marick observed that Ruby programmers often tend to work in an Agile manner. In various cases the Ruby programmers were not even even aware of Agile as a software method.
• Reece Newman pointed out that good tools tend to be “culture neutral.” Hence, they can induce behavioral changes without necessitating explicit culture change pushes.
• Last but not least – expect Agile Roots to be held again in 2010!