Agile*Product*AI

Sometimes I feel like half the trash I read on the agile internet groups and blogs is written by counter-culture contrarian anarchists that smoke pot and sleep in yurts on the Oregon coast (I highly recommend at least the yurt on the Oregon coast). These extremists abhor most formal process and gods forbid someone tried to profit from writing a piece of software – especially software that can help them get their job done. Most of the rest of the crap on these same groups feels like it comes from neo-McCarthy-ist control freaks that seek to institute PMI-like controls and measures on agile development including mean time between potty breaks (which of course at which you’ll be randomly drug tested). They storm the hallways wielding their ten square meter Gantt chart like a light saber unwilling to accept that any project of material scope or effort could be managed without it. Why am I so agitated today? I am very worried that something that we built that was a simple and efficient way ...

In the early days of Scrum, we talked a lot about chaos theory and self-organization. We wanted to believe that “management” was unnecessary and even counterproductive to getting software built. Well, after 15 years and many, many agile projects (some more successful than others), I’ve formed some pretty strong opinions on how self-organization and team leadership impact a software project’s success.  A team has to have a strong, management supported leader. For purposes of this discussion, this is the team lead. It’s not important what title is on the team lead’s business card.  It may be Development Manager, Project Manager, ScrumMaster, Program Manager or whatever other label your organization is comfortable with. What is important is the knowledge and experience of the team lead. The team leader must have at least five years hands-on experience actually building software (I am assuming here that we’re talking about building software products). By this, I mean that the lead...