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