I Really Don’t Know

Agile != Flexible

We had a retrospective today, just a small one post iteration. Sam Tunnicliffe (a very smart cookie, picking up .Net far faster than I did) suggested that this Agile approach, with its focus on communication, doing the next most important thing, relying on your team mates for pairing in order to write better code and checking in and our frequently doesn’t gel with flexible working and home working.

I agree with him, but I find it interesting that the two companies I’ve worked for in an Agile way both have a strong focus on other “great place to work” concerns.

We talked a bit about the opportunity to “spike” things on your own and bring back that learning, but that often doesn’t fit as the highest priority piece of work, so is more “something to do”.

I’m fairly biased – I prefer to be in the office, with two small children and another on the way I don’t have the luxury of being able to sit down quietly; I get jumped on by about 3 stone of energetic child. Nor do I have a great answer to the problem. It may prove interesting to see who decides they want to work from home and who decides they must communicate.

Disappeared…

Well, I disappeared for a while. Things are very busy and very interesting at my place of work currently. We’re running two projects with tight deadlines, both of which are now going quite nicely and we’re trying to adopt more agile approaches.

A few of us are blogging on our experiences introducing new agile practices – as we go. Learning such lessons as… don’t introduce refactoring until after you’ve introduced developer testing. Andy (colleague) is attempting to procure some lava lamps for the LLPDCA (Lava-Lamp Powered Developer Conscience Alerting) aka CruiseControl.