Marius Frâncu

Forming a team, an agile perspective

I’m seriously concerned about this topic because I see the disastrous effects of its bad handling every day. It’s not enough to put some people together and ask them, usually in a perverse, detached and manipulative way, that no matter the difficulties encountered, they should make it work because this is what professionals do – in a way this is like an abdication of the job a manager should do rigorously. I know it’s hard, damn hard, I made my share of mistakes …

I wrote about this topic before.

But this time I would like to recall two important perspectives, from the agile world, that unfortunately seem to be ignored:

1. Early this year a nice interview(1) with Jerry Weinberg was published. In it, he described one method to form a team:

“…We put together teams. What I recommend is people put together their agile teams by what I call incremental consensus. You start with one person who you feel has the personal qualities. Stop emphasizing very soon with what I read about is people emphasizing: you got to have the most skilled coder and you can put all the best coders together and then you have an agile team. Now you find someone who has got these personal qualities: they know how to communicate , they’re willing to communicate, they’re willing to admit their mistakes and learn. And you start with that person. And you say: okay now among all the people we have available to us who would you like most to team up with to do a good job; you understand the agile principles. And they choose of course… it’s one person so it’s a consensus and the person has to want to be on it … Now you have two people. Now you say to them: okay now come to an agreement on who else you’d like to have. If you started with the right person the process goes on and they put together a team that really does well; and they take awhile to learn but they can learn the skills, technical skills, more easily than they can learn the personal skills, the people’s skills as we call them…”

In 2016, after a horrible month of solving some issues, with a delicate suite of products, I realized that this is the time when the core problem could be solved. It could be solved because the key persons were prepared to allow the kind of work I had in my mind for almost 2 years. In that terrible month, I have worked with some wonderful people to fix the problems. I knew that the kind of work I wanted to do needed special people. Even before I spoke with the management, I spoke with each of them separately. I told them what I had in mind and the persons I wanted to do the work with. I needed their green light regarding the work that needs to be done, their future colleagues and if they were willing to join the team. I left them time to reflect on all those things. In this time I talked with no one else. After several days we spoke again, separately, and each of them gave the green light. Then I spoke with management and it was hard…but I was determined, if one of them could not join the new setup, I would not take in charge that new project/product. I wanted from each of the future team members their consensus. And as Jerry Weinberg said, it was not only about the technical skills of these people, it was much much more. Please watch the Jerry Weinberg interview.

2. Scrum Plop(2) – I am amazed that so many Scrum people, from my circles, are not aware of this. It’s about patterns that show and help on how to implement Scrum. If Scrum guide seems abstract and hard to be decoded, well these patterns help a lot in making sense on how to implement Scrum. There is a pattern called Stable Teams(3) which accurately articulates the problem and also gives a solution:

“…Keep teams stable and avoid shuffling people around between teams. Stable teams tend to get to know their capacity, which makes it possible for the business to have some predictability. Dedicate team members to a single team whenever possible. Members of Stable Teams get to know each other. The team members experience each other’s work style and learn how much work they can do together. A Stable Team grows in familiarity and consistency of meeting mutual expectations and starts developing a Community of Trust…. what is often forgotten when measuring a team’s velocity is that the only way that a team can get to know their velocity is by having the same team members over a longer period of time…”

Trust is a key/serious/important word. Trust takes time because is arising from people interactions over a certain period of time. You cannot create a roadmap or a checklist on how to build trust within a team.

Since I mentioned Scrum above, it is important to also mention 2 important related details about it:

– an important detail, also applicable to teams, is about competence(4)/skill/mastery/expertise. Although this is an aspect that is not explicitly specified in the Scrum guide, it is a sine qua non condition for Scrum to work;

– management plays an important role when forming the team. Not an easy thing to do. But after they’ve formed the team, they should trust them and let them accomplish their mission(5).

Conclusion:

Every time I think about this subject, I think about families. Look at families, at how delicate things can get sometimes, because family members can’t get along with each other. And it’s not like this problem can be easily solved by a parent, for example, by just saying: “hey, you are brothers, you are supposed to get along”. Some will say, when speaking about team members, that it’s not about friends or family members. And I say “Exactly. It’s even harder and it’s not that easy to impose things”. So, I imagine that for some managers it’s easier to pretend that they don’t know things/techniques on forming a team, and then use some fancy words and clichés to “solve it”, thus tossing the effort they should have done onto the shoulders of other people. But the reality has its own style to deny certain approaches/ideas/opinions.

What was a surprise for me is that it can be really really dangerous to desire having a Stable Team. The surprise was even bigger that the danger came from people which actually, at least declaratively, supports and promotes Scrum and agility.

(1) Jerry Weinberg, “Agile for Humans #26: Agile Impressions and Errors with Jerry Weinberg”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_AOoSnhE-8

(2) Scrum Pattern Community, Jim Coplien – Product Owner for the Scrum Patterns effort, http://www.scrumplop.org/

(3) Stable Teams Pattern, https://sites.google.com/a/scrumplop.org/published-patterns/product-organization-pattern-language/development-team/stable-teams

(4) Jim Coplien, “Ten things scrummers do wrong”, https://vimeo.com/42772592

(5) Alistair Cockburn, “Core scrum, barnacles, rumors and hearsay, improved version”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuUadPoi35M

Forming a team discussion metaphor

Shu(1): I need your help.

Ri: About what?

Shu: Help me with a metaphor. I see teams formed just by simple association of people, at least this is my feeling. I want to tell my boss, or anyone who does this, that is not quite like this. Sometimes is hard for me to explain a certain subject without being to verbose. But now I need something simple, but powerful to explain what I feel.

Ri: Hmm….[smiling]

Shu: Is hard to start a new battle and a lot of problems will appear because of this …. help me please.

[A moment of silence appears. Shu is looking at Ri puzzled. Suddenly the Ri’s face became serious and his right palm suddenly and firmly is put on the table.]

Ri: Look at the fingers. All have their place.

[Shu looked for several seconds, and put his right hand near Ri’s hand]

Shu: And my fingers are not on your hand and your fingers are not on my hand. Each have its place.

[Ri smiled]

Ri: You see, with this hand you can do a lot of things. It depends on you. The cohesion of the fingers helps in doing different things. They work for a purpose/goal. The same is with people, they are different and they have to work for a common goal/purpose/direction.

[Shu interrupts Ri, like continuing what Ri says]

Shu: And you cannot do that if you are not careful on how you choose those people. If you have a broken/abnormal finger it affects the things you can do with the hand.

[Ri smiled]

From a discussion had with clinical psychologist Dr. Ion Zamfir regarding management.

(1) Alistair Cockburn, “Shu Ha Ri”: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri

The problem of connecting the dots

Recently I read an article (1) . The article is about Fred Brooks, his book (“‎The Mythical Man-Month‎”’) and the fact that the overhead of communication is direct proportionality with the number of people and the number of different communication channels, also increases rapidly with the number of employees.

I liked a lot the drawings from the article. It was a very nice representation of this connection between increasing the number of people and increasing the number of communication channels. After I read the article, I realised those images don’t fully represent the whole story.

The following things activated in my head, maybe I am wrong, but still:

1) Max Boisot made similar drawings(2) and observed an interesting thing – yes, at that moment, he was speaking in the context of international terrorism. So, depending on the number of dots he have:

-for N=4 we have 6 possible links and 64 possible patterns;

-for N=10 we have 45 possible links and 3.5 trillion possible patterns;

-for N=12 we have 66 possible links and 4.700 quadrillion possible patterns;

For him dots were the data, links the information and patterns the knowledge. And an important point is to process the patterns.

2) Then I remembered what Dave Snowden said regarding identity in humans, inspired by anthropology :”Identity is fluid in humans, we move between roles depending on context and have developed rituals by which we can temporarily align our identity with a role for collective purpose.”(3)

So, maybe one dot, from the drawing, actually can be more than one dot because people can shift identities.

3) For sure Fred Brooks was right in the sense that we should not add people late in the project. And yes “‎The Mythical Man-Month” is a wonderful book.

Conclusion: In a sense those drawings, from the article mentioned, made me visualize how nasty things can be. Those drawings are beautiful, but somehow incomplete, is just the tip of the iceberg. They made me understand better how tangled complexity can be.

Regarding the conclusion “les managers doivent s’assurer d’optimiser le nombre de salariés travaillant sur une tâche, ni trop, ni trop peu…” –> I think that, if the manager (first line manager) is not involved in the work(does not interact with the system, is not with the ‘skin in the game’) the chance to make bad decisions is increased a lot. I think is possible for a project with just 3 people to give a lot of headache. The manager should be aware that:

– there will always be hidden surprises;

– there will be volatility;

– when there is prediction to be sure unpredicted things will pop-up.

Note: The title of this blog post is inspired by (2)

(1) Cadreo, “La loi de Brooks ou pourquoi la multiplication des collaborateurs fait perdre du temps”, https://www.cadreo.com/actualites/dt-loi-brooks-ou-pourquoi-multiplier-les-collaborateurs-sur-un-projet-fait-perdre-du-temps

(2) Christopher Bellavita, “Nidal Hasan and the problem of connecting the dots”, http://www.hlswatch.com/2009/11/12/nidal-hasan-and-the-problem-of-connecting-the-dots/ or use this link https://web.archive.org/web/20091123034027/http://www.hlswatch.com/2009/11/12/nidal-hasan-and-the-problem-of-connecting-the-dots/

(3) Dave Snowden, “Three or five?”, http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/three-or-five/

Crystal (Clear) – Part 2

In the previous post I tried to describe the why, in this second part I try to describe the context and some particulars.

The vision/direction

The vision of this project was borned because of a pain. Pain experienced by a lot of people trying to make the software work for a new certain type of client. People from all levels of the company were involved. The existing product we speak was formed by 3 big sub-products. This meant that integration between the 3 sub-products had to work. We knew about this problem for some time, but usually people react when there is a great need or a pain. So I waited for this occasion, all the other efforts being useless, to rise the idea that it can be solved and all this integration setup to take ~20 minutes.

The team formation

In those difficult moments, from the start, the right technical persons were being chosen to make the integration work for that new client. After a month of big presure the problem was solved and it was decided that we should make the project. I asked for those initial persons. I did not said: “Please give me one person from project A, another one from project B, and one from Project C”. When I spoke with the responsible for each of the sub-project, I asked them for the specific person. I emphasized the fact that I need those persons, by saying their full name, and that is not a coincidence that is about them. I wanted to show the importance of each of the person needed.

A team is not formed by choosing randomly/available/free people, not at all … is much more difficult.

Before going to speak regarding the possibility to have a new project I spoke which each of the persons which I wanted in the new team. For me it was clear that no other person would qualify, so the project would have been with them or not at all. I wanted to have their approval and permission. I have said to them no platitudes or pseudo-motivation stuff. I say this because otherwise I would have consider that I would tell bullshit and offend them and that is not an option for me. They agreed and so the work to form the team started.

It was not easy, but in the end, the desired team was formed: 5 persons. The respect between us, at least what I felt, was enormous. I realized again that once the right people are in place then we can concentrate on the nasty things from the outside. At least we knew that no problems would occur from inside and I was right. I am amazed of how much energy is lost on trying to solve internal problems just because the team is formed in a careless way, a lot of energy is lost and not on solving the real problem(s).

In all this a wonderful person from the client helped us a lot.

Strategy

We knew what we wanted to do grosso modo. We begun the discussions between us, in Crystal parlance I would say it was the “Reflective Improvement”. There are many details which can be said regarding how we defined the strategy and documented it to offer vizibility, but one thing I remembered vividly is the technique named “Advocatus Diaboli”(1) which helped us a lot. We knew from the start that the colleague, playing the devil advocate, intention was not to hurt us, not at all. Actually he was more like the guardian angel and this from the moment when that pain begun.

Although we had the strategy, we knew surprises will occur, we realized from the beginning that we will meet those unknown unknowns(2).

Also we decided to use a different style of reporting to show our progress and we used the Parking Lots diagrams from FDD(Feature Driven Development) – we wanted to see better the forest from the trees and also to avoid possible anomalies with the current techniques involved with story points – a future blog post will be done regarding this.

Robustness vs Resilience(3)

We knew we couldn’t tackle an important subject and repair code without causing problems/bugs in production. There were too many instabilities we had to deal with. Even if a problem would have occured in production, we knew we would have to solve it as soon as possible, to recover fast. This way of thinking helped us not being paralyzed/rigid in our approach. What I can say is that is strange when one team focus on resilience and all the others on robustness(actually was rigidity), still we did not gave up. On each occasion I had, I tried to emphasize the need to concentrate on resilience not on robustness.

The Seven Properties of Crystal(4)(5)

For me these properties were like constraints in the complex adaptive systems. But I let one of the team members to describe these properties in connection with the project, in the next post.

(1) “Devil’s advocate”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate

(2) Dave Snowden, “The Origins of Cynefin”, http://old.cognitive-edge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/The-Origins-of-Cynefin-Cognitive-Edge.pdf

(3) Dave Snowden, “Risk and Resilience”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hhu0ihG3kY

(4) Alistair Cockburn, “Crystal Clear Applied: The Seven Properties of Running an Agile Project”, http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=345009

(6) Alistair Cockburn, “Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams”, https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0201699478

Crystal (Clear) – Part 1

Recently I saw a video from an agile conference(1). I have looked at the video because of two persons appearing in that video: Dave Snowden and Alistair Cockburn. Dave Snowden is co-author of DSDM and Alistair Cockburn is creator of Crystal methodologies(2). In that agile meeting, where the term agile was coined(3), these 2 methodologies were represented also.

When looking at this video I noticed one remark, made by Alistair Cockburn, which made me sad, he said: “…….is like Crystal Clear, completely irrelevant…”. Is it irrelevant? For me and my team members surely was not. We have applied Crystal, recently, 2 times:

A project started at the end of 2016 and ended in February 2018;
A project lasted for 3 months at the beginning of 2017.

I noticed that is hard to use a way of working which is different than the dominant way of working, in this case Scrum – but I think this would have happened also if dominant methodology would have been something else, because is about people, not methodologies. I noticed that some people, calling themselves Scrum Master or fully devoted to Scrum, if I can say so, were disturbed by this and I do not understand why. I say this because Scrum has its roots also in Toyota Production System, in this sense I try to imagine a great line manager or a Kami-sama(4) who will avoid learning/investigating/exploring/experimenting something just because “that’s how things are”…

But let me tell you why Crystal proved useful to us:

-it helped us to respond promptly in a multi-ontologic(5) space → we had the properties ( frequent delivery; reflective improvement; osmotic communication; personal safety;focus; easy access to expert users; technical environment with automated tests, configuration management, and frequent integration) as guidance then techniques followed;

-It was like a cognitive activation that allowed us to be agile, but also to be pragmatic and solve the problems we had. And yes they, my team, realized they can be agile by other means;

-It helped us to face that volatility is needed ( well actually will appear unannounced) sometimes in projects, although the trend -in my circles – is against volatility;

-it helped me to think at the granularity(5). I mean how things (techniques, events, formalities) combine. With Scrum, on how was applied and enforced upon on us, we saw we were like paralyzed ( all was very rigid like being strait-laced. What mattered was velocity and predictability. Things were done but without the knowledge of why. We had to put stuff in sprints because we had to fill in those sprints and a lot of energy was lost with that.We were trying to solve something, but is not that we had clear list of the things to be done; it was about creativity, investigation, experimentation, observation. Yet we knew that at the end of each month things, important things, had to be delivered. Delivered, and as far as I was concerned without useless pressure and fully aware that those things will/might fail and they failed, and it was/should be ok to fail; but things went ok also because of those preceding failures among other things. A short answer would be that people respond to something based on patterns of the recent past experiences, whether good or bad )

-I like to say that it also solved a sociological problem. In a way, Scrum is becoming ironized, unfortunately, especially Scrum Masters – as I said is about people and how prepared they are and even more their desire to be prepared. Members of my team have had very bad experiences with that kind of Scrum and begun to doubt the religiosity which surrounds it.

I was very proud, that in a monthly meeting, when a presentation was made regarding the ways of working, Crystal was there – in a list of 8 or 10 projects. I think 50 people saw the Crystal in that slide. And when I had the occasion I spoke about Crystal.

Those lines above were written when the big project was in danger of not “receiving the final acceptance”. I was calm because anyway our work was in production already, each month our work was delivered in production and things were ok. And if things were not ok we responded fast. Is important to make this note, because usually the description of something differs depending on the outcome – in this case the outcome was rather a sad one. The lines above were reviewed by all the team members. And finally, things are ok, it seems.

Crystal is relevant for me, and it was for my team. Each time an intern is assigned to me I’ll take care they will know also about Alistair Cockburn, Jim Highsmith. So maybe Alistair Cockburn work is not lost, for me it matters – I know I am just one person but I am :).

In the next post I’ll detail a little bit the how.

(1) AgileByExample 2017: Discussion panel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTZlLBUo1gE

(2) Alistair Cockburn, “Crystal methodologies”, http://alistair.cockburn.us/Crystal+methodologies

(3) Manifesto for Agile Software Development, http://agilemanifesto.org/

(4) Craig Trudell, Yuki Hagiwara, Ma Jie,”Humans replacing robots herald Toyota’s vision of future”, http://www.livemint.com/Companies/B53nQRpNGDTrVMYrcD1RBK/Humans-replacing-robots-herald-Toyotas-vision-of-future.html

(5) Dave Snowden, “Multi-ontology sense making; a new simplicity in decision making“ http://cognitive-edge.com/articles/multi-ontology-sense-making-a-new-simplicity-in-decision-making/

(6) Dave Snowden, “Granularity”, http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/granularity/

Do Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches need a technical background? – Part 2

In the first part I gave a short answer to this question. I have also wrote here and here about the nature of the Scrum Master.

Now I’ll try to give the long answer:

A person asking this question lives in a certain context. In that context, certain events pop up, events that trigger this kind of question. Different answers might appear, answers that are based on premises. Sometimes, those premises are not made explicit, because not everything which is implicit can be made explicit.

For me, this question activated multiple dimensions in my mind: Scrum, Scrum Master, XP, XP Coach, technical background meaning, agile coach meaning, team maturity, processes/management, complexity, utopia/ideal. So:

– Scrum Master, as it is defined in the Scrum guide(1), doesn’t have any activities regarding technical stuff that need to be made. The SM has to take care of how Scrum is applied, and make sure it is made according to the Scrum guide, so no technical background is being mentioned;

– Scrum wants to be a more general purpose framework for developing (complex) products. For example, regarding software products, Scrum does not address anything regarding technical aspects nor does it prohibit any such aspects – actually it borrowed a lot from XP;

– XP(Extreme Programming) came with the idea of a coach(2) first, even before the scrum master was defined(*). XP was designed especially for software development work. It contains specific technical activities connected in a special way. It’s not like one chooses a technical activity at the expense of another one;

– A coach in XP had to defend the process, but the process is quite different: the coach must help the team maintain the disciplines(pair programming, refactoring, metaphor, continuous integration…). This position would be a rotating one meaning that the coach needs to be someone who knows how to apply what he defends, not just by using words/encouragement/…;

– XP has the same non-technical “protocol” as Scrum;

– Maturity of the team: This is an important detail. Reality seems to give us lots of surprises, challenging ones. This means that an immature team can pose difficult challenges. If the team is mature enough then SM/Agile Coach is no longer needed or is only partially needed, so in the rest of the time, he/she can help other projects or do actual work in the same project;

– Agile Coach: This is, for me, a very abused title. I’m sure that there are damn good agile coaches out there, but most of the time, I only see fake/charlatans/unprepared/naive agile coaches. When I read Agile Coach, I thought of XP, because this role is explicitly mentioned there. Now I know that not everyone can be like the agile signatory guys, or like the grandfather of agile Jerry Weinberg, or like Allen Holub, or like Jim Coplien, … but they do raise the bar for a person calling himself/herself an agile coach. I cannot accept that an agile coach doesn’t know about the work of all the people who were there in Snowbird in 2001;

– Process, management: It seems that in management, after so many years of agile, there is a tendency to put process first and people second, when it should be the other way around( of course ontology matters, but what I see is that there is always a single and identical ontology approach). In Scrum, the role of a SM can be filled in by anyone, I say this having in mind that this role is not so restrictive/specific/targeted like for an XP Coach. I am so tired to see/hear this scenario: “As long as a person is able to speak about processes/platitudes/nonsense, but in a very well masked way, that person is good enough to be a SM. The discourse is not aligned with the aptitudes.” → unfortunately, because of this, SM became, at least in my circles, ridiculed. I am very well aware that the problem is not Scrum but how it is applied. Maybe all this is deliberate, I mean why “sacrifice” a good developer, when some unskilled, but good with processes person can be put as SM/Agile Coach.

Moreover, SM are actually in management position, seen as PM – if this is ok or not is a different story, but it is happening;

– Complexity: XP and Scrum offer different conceptual boundaries. This means that also actions will differ.

– Technical: For me, initially, technical referred to the programming stuff beneath a software project. But, maybe, the “technical” word is actually about:

what SM/Agile Coach can do to help actively(within a specific task or story) the team in their work;
how to get the information directly via his/her skills;
special work without which things would not be ok, but which is very close and very important to programming, like testing(Rapid Software Testing).

This means “technical” might be translated as being aware of the technicalities of each discipline in delivering the needed work.

– Utopia/Ideal: There are too many discussions about the ideal situation, ignoring the crude reality/present. Maybe the focus/managing should be on the present, the situated present(3), and this might influence what a SM/Agile Coach should actually do, instead of doing just what is prescribed in some guides. If this means being proactive, go beyond what he/she knows, have initiative, try to understand the details of the work of his/her team, do some work on the project then why not…

Conclusion: What I have tried is to show the multiple dimensionality of this problem. It’s not easy: we have history, methodologies, management, processes, reality/multi-ontology, utopias, expectations.

We have to see beyond a certain guide, or methodology, or situation. A SM/Agile Coach has a special role/meaning/importance in and for a team. The “Master” title means mastery, leading, experienced, great, cognoscente; a “coach” means teaching, training….We need to face the reality and see what works and what doesn’t and respond accordingly. How can a SM/Agile Coach respond to the multi-ontologies if he/she is not prepared? Yes, I am raising the bar because I saw too many clown SMs or Agile Coaches that follow a certain recipe and respond with platitudes and say “that’s it, my job is done”.

So, Does a Scrum Master/Agile Coache need a technical background?

I would say yes, among other things. Can I accept the fact that there can be exceptions ? Yes, but I hope that the SM/Agile Coach can really make up the lack of technical background with other skills.

(*)Update February 25, 2018: I made a mistake above in the sentence “XP(Extreme Programming) came with the idea of a coach(2) first, even before the scrum master was defined. ” . → Thank you Jim Coplien for your feedback:

“Well, no. Scrum had the ScrumMaster role in 1994. Mary Rettig was the first ScrumMaster and it was at Easel Corporation.

XP didn’t even exist until quite a few *years* later.“

(1) Scrum Guide, http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

(2) Robert C. Martin, “The Agile Team”, https://cleancoders.com/episode/clean-code-episode-50/show

(3) Dave Snowden, “Managing the situated present”, http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/managing-the-situited-present/

Do Scrum Master/Agile Coach need a technical background? – Part 1

Short answer: I try to see/imagine how things work in other industries/jobs that imply building something. For example: army, surgery, accounting. I suppose for each of them, there are some processes/methods that are put in place. But there are also very important technical aspects. Of course, what technical means in the army is different from what technical means for surgery – but I think the technical part matters. So would it make sense for a person, with an important and distinctive role in the team, to have no technical knowledge? Probably not…Answers to similar questions already exist in other jobs/domains, that are much older.

A longer answer will be published in a future post.

Why would you automate, in testing, anything?

If with the word “everything” it was, for me, like an exacerbation regarding automation well with the word “anything” is something else.

Initially I thought that “anything” word is problematic because it seemed like absolute word which ignores context. But actually – I had to stay and think about it for 2 months – it might open the perspective of making sense of the multi-ontologies. It invites to dig more. Is like putting under the question why bother to try to automate something and because of this, in a way, it points into a direction to take context into consideration. Context which is situational, relational, temporal, …

Why would you automate, in testing, everything?

A bit of context: I was trying to answer a question Michael Bolton put on the Rapid Software Testing Slack chat group, the question was “Why would you automate anything?”. Yes, it was the word “anything” not the word “everything”. In trying to respond to the original question I answered also to the question from the title of this post. In my head was a mixture of those two different words, strange…

Below are several reasons I spot it about why is this desire to automate, well to automate everything :

– some managers does not have a clue what professional testing is ( by professional testing I mean Rapid Software Testing a Context Driven Methodology). The managers still think of it in manufacturing terms(” automate as much as we can”). And because of this then they want a way to speed up things. They see testing as tangible stuff. When I say management, I’m not referring only at the first level, but at all levels in an IT company;

– some testers who are not aware of their profession. Is a trend now with (using) tools, who encourage this. It seems the marketing promoting the tools is doing a good job. And novices (we should not confuse years worked with years of experience) think this is the way. Then with the help of uninformed management we arrive at the desire to automate everything. Somehow these testers are not aware of the misinformation they are doing, is not an intentional thing;

– some testers who see the trend( the dominant thinking) and for their personal advantage go on this path. They don’t care about the interest of the project. This is sick and a unprofessional behaviour which I witnessed several times;

– some programmers who are ignorant of what a tester really does. They think, because of their arrogance, that are too smart to need a tester or to respect him/her. For me this enters in the unprofessionalism behaviour;

– some programmers with good intentions seeing the benefit in automation but trying to make a general rule without having other thoughts. For sure these are not senior/advanced developers. I say this because a real senior/advanced developer knows the plethora of the possible problems and they shut up and think, holistically, before speaking/making a decision;

– a teacher/mentor/manager making their people to think about what it means to automate everything. I can extend here the idea that a tester/programer might do this do investigate/search/discover more about this topic.

Being agile without noise

This evening I remembered how I begun to work and how I made sense of agile. These vivid memories appeared because I saw a person with whom I worked in those days.

I don’t recall, while working there, the word “agile” being pronounced. It was one year and a half after the agile manifesto was signed. I remember now that I saw on the company’s site a page with text and a nice simple image describing the agile stuff, but in a personalized way! I was searching the web site of the company not because I was being told to do it, but because I was curious of what was on their site.

There, in those days, in the day to day work, in a discussion you would have not heard remarques like:

“we are agile”;
“we do scrum”;
“I am a scrum master”;
“I am an agile coach”;
“As a scrum master or agile coach I would…”;
“this is not agile”;
“this is waterfall”;
“ yes we are agile … we have sprints”;
….
The person I speak about, I think is one of the best professionals I have worked with. I tried to imagine his response on the question “Do you work agile?” or something similar. I think it would have been like asking Morihei Ueshiba if he knows about martial arts. I think his response would have been a smile. A smile letting you know that you started with the wrong question.

At that moment in that firm there were 3 persons like him. These professionals were complete, if I can say so – they were the top of the seniors: good programming skills and knowledge, mentorship, working with requirements, working with the client directly, handling people,… — they were one of a kind.

I saw this guy handling in one day: ColdFusion, C# and C++. And it was so natural to him. I said C# because I went to him with my work which was bad. He asked me “Why did you do it like this?”. I tried to give him an explanation and I remembered he said stuff, but he saw hesitation/doubt/lack of knowledge/stupidity in me. He took the keyboard and begun to work in my code. He was, in that moment, in a lot of pressure because he had other stuff to finish. I was so impressed on how he begun to program and explain. It was guiding with facts/attitude not just words or platitudes.

You would have gone to these guys and you could have not tricked them with a simple discourse/speach or induce them in error with charm or platitudes.

For them was so natural to be in that spirit. They made no hassle about it. It was like it was written in the manifesto and I did not had the sensation of rigidity in the approaches we made at that time. We made daily and I did not realize I made daily, it was so natural…

I am glad and so lucky that I understood from them how…well you got it.

Conclusion: I think Jerry Weinberg was right when he said that “Agile methods will be successful if and when we stop seeing them as anything other than normal, sensible, professional methods of developing software.”(1)

◎ Image from http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri

(1) Gerald M. Weinberg, “Agile impressions”, https://leanpub.com/jerrysblog