Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Who am I to blow against the wind

In a recent discussion on the implementation of agile techniques, I ran into the aspect of "courage" - one of the cornerstones promoted by the eXtreme Programming evangelists. In most of the organizations I rolled out agile techniques so far, there was always some flavour of "courage" required to get things done. But I never really saw it as an explicit requirement. People needed to be convinced of Test First principles, refactoring versus big-design-up-front or pair-programming, but I never had to "stand up and fight" ... eventually these things "sell" themselves if you're willing to muddy your boots. But in a recent implementation, the need for "courage" became key. The tention fields that determined the projectcontext were so strong - we would typically call it a "political" heavy loaded project - that the "common sense" aspects typical for the agile toolbox came to a halt.
Convincing the project team to have the guts to deal with these tention fields instead of going for work arounds was a tough thing to do. Getting people out of their trenches and make them couragous enough to give up the "who am I to blow against the wind" mind-set ... as far as I know, there's no open source toolset yet that can help us on this.

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