Tech Life of Recht

I usually don’t use much time on YouTube and other sites like that, because it simply takes up too much time. However, yesterday I was introduced to Agil Hitler, and if you haven’t met him, then now is the time. Once again, you have to wonder who makes this stuff, and where do they get the ideas? I don’t know, but apparently it’s pretty popular to create this sort of video, just check out the related videos section. Politically incorrect? Check. Funny? Check. Waste of time? Check.

Projects for the public sector have, for a long time, had a reputation of being overspecified, tightly controlled, contract-focused, and in many cases badly managed. Some call them waterfall projects. Luckily, it’s been a while since I was on a project like that – the projects I’ve worked on, also for NITA have been run as Scrum projects with a good amount of success. It has, however, mostly been smaller projects – a month or two, and without any real focus on the process from the customer’s side. Now it looks like we’re finally heading away from the classic waterfall approach, as NITA has openly confessed to Scrum (in Danish only). Just as important, Trifork is helping both with Scrum and doing the implementation. I’m not on the project at the moment (still busy with OIOSAML and REST), but I’d be surprised if I didn’t get involved at some point.

As I wrote earlier, I spent the first three days of this week on a Kent Beck course Kent Beck hurried on to QCon London to give a keynote with more or less the same overall message as in the course: accountability and responsibility is just about everything. When you take responsibility, you earn trust, which again enabled you to have a better relationship with other people, including developers, customers, managers, and so on.
One interesting bit came up in regard to discipline. I’ve always said that XP and agile processes take discipline to implement and use. Kent Beck’s take on this was that it was just the opposite – not doing XP was hard for him. Instead, it’s more or less a question of habit, which is where the problem often lies: Changing part of yourself requires an investment, but it’s not completely clear when the investment will yield a profit. Ironically, this economical argument is also used to promote XP: push the cost into the future and pull the profit closer – for example by releasing often, not gold plating, and so on.
Adopting an agile process then becomes a question of how you change habits, and keep from falling back into the old ones. Leadership is one way, double- and triple-loop learning is another, and there are probably many more. Incidentally, this is exactly the subject I worked with at university together with Michael with just about the same results.

Enticing title? Unfortunately, I don’t quite have much to say about the subject – or at least nothing to say here, but hopefully that will get much better next week. For 3 days (Monday-Wednesday), I will be attending a Trifork special, a course held by Kent Beck, the father of XP and much of the agile movement. I’ve never experienced Kent Beck live before, but I expect the best. As always, the main conclusion will probably be that the secret consists of two things: experience and discipline. Still, it doesn’t hurt to learn some new techniques, which I hope will be the case with this course.