Mr. Feathers is in India for 2 weeks. He is doing a TDD training for a company in Bangalore.

Flashback: I was really happy when he dropped me an email saying he is coming to India and would like to meet up with Agile enthusiasts in the area. After exchanging a few emails, we settled on running 3 free workshops in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. Yes, that’s right, its your opportunity to meet him in person and spend 3 hrs talking about Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

As usual we are using the Position Paper’s concept to filter in the really interested folks. Over a period of time, the quality of the position papers are improving. Also position papers helps in setting expectations on both sides, the presenter and the participants. The present can adapt their workshop based on the position papers and the participants can gauge what the workshop will feel like based on other people’s position paper. 

I really looking forward to pair with him on my Avatars of TDD experiment. 

Of late, most of my talks have been challenging the dogmatism that exists in the Agile community. I hate the whole “Our way or Highway (no-way)” attitude. Do it by the book or you are not Agile. Do X, Y & Z else you are not Agile.

Who’d believe with the way things are here
We’d be going everywhere telling people how to live?
Who’d believe we’d spend more
Shippin’ products with broken builds
Than to educate our minds?
Sorry but that’s what most do

I can’t help but think,
Someone’s foresaken you and me

By far what I see Agile today is, its “Process OVER People”. I could be completely wrong, but this is what I see happening in a lot (not every single) company. Because I think this way, some folks think I’m “Post Agile”. If challenging what some people are trying to push in the community is becoming “Post that community”. Then I guess I’m “Post Dogmatism”, I’m “Post Silverbulletism”.

I have always been of the opinion that Agile is just a means and not an end in itself. So is technology and so are companies and software they build.

If there is a new way, I’ll be first in line. 

And this continues to puzzle me….

Through the Agile Software Community of India, I’m organizing three workshops by Mary and Tom Poppendieck in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. As a way to ensure quality (passionate and committed) individuals get to attend this workshop, I introduced the concept of a position paper. To participate in the workshop interested people have to add their position papers to ASCI wiki. The position paper is a simple, plain text response to 3 basic questions. The idea is we have an index page (home page) for the workshop in each city. People are supposed to add their name to the table (index) and link their position paper page from this index. This helps each one create a position paper page on the wiki, add what they want to add to the page and then link it up to the index, so that anyone can see who all have signed-up and if they want to know details about any person, they can click on their position paper link.

This might sound a little cryptic, but when you have an example to see, it all seems to make perfect sense to me. But if you see what has been happening on our wiki with these position papers is:

• Some people don’t know wikis and they just email me saying here is my position paper. I’m happy at least these folks are not messing the whole wiki
• Some people can add their name to the index, but don’t know how to create link. Even if there are 30 other people who have create a link one line above their text, they cannot figure out how to create a link. There is a link to the guide, but that apparently is not helping people either.
• Some people don’t understand or don’t want to understand how to edit a table on a wiki.  Even if there are lots of other people who have added their rows to the table, some people cannot figure out how to. They keep doing wired things like randomly adding pipes and that messes the whole table up.
• There is a description on the top of the page linking to the position paper description page. Some people click on this link, delete the position paper definition and add their position paper right there.
• Some folks just clicking on the first person’s position paper, deleting the content on the page and adding their own content. So you click on person A’s position paper and you’ll see Person X’s position paper
• Worst of all, some people are deleting the whole index page and just adding their position paper without any name or any other details.

In all these instances, people are not try to knowingly mess the wiki, but unknowingly are doing all this non-sense. Now one might feel this is common sense, why is this so difficult? If nothing else copy what others have done and that seems to work. My big question is “How can these guys build complex software applications for their clients, if they can’t work with a wiki”?

You know what scares the shit out of me, when I think of over 1 million people in the Indian IT industry who are out there. At least these people are taking an initiative and trying to learn something by attending these sessions. But what about those over million software professionals who don’t even have the drive or energy to learn something new?

At the last Agile Coach Camp I gave a lightening talk on “Process OVER People”. In this talk I requested all the coaches present at the conference to really think about their advice to companies. Are we trying to put a process boundary and become Process police? Is this coaching? A lot of coaches I meet, recommend “First do it by the Book, then deviate”. What does “First Do it by the Book” mean? I appreciate the book and I think there is a wealth of knowledge out there. But we should remember the book was written with some context in mind and at some point in time. One cannot blindly take what is in the book and try to apply it. That really feels like “Process OVER People” to me. You need to take your team into account. You need to consider what you are trying to build and most importantly you need to prioritize what needs to be fixed on your team or in your organization before trying to go and “Do it by the Book”.

Over the last couple of years I really feel Agile is gone into a mass-production mode and we’ve stopped innovating. Every company wants to be Agile. This has lead to a huge demand for Agile Coaches. And because of this you find all kind of people claiming to be Agile coaches. What surprises me is a lot of these folks have themselves never really worked on an Agile project. Forget Agile project, a lot them don’t really have a successful project delivery story to share. How can one preach something and do something else (or do nothing)? My belief is that one needs to lead by example and not my blabbering crap.

I asked the participants at the conference to tell me what new tricks, techniques, tips, practices, etc they have learnt in the last one or two. Very few people (may be 2 out of 50) had something to share. Are we getting so busy mass producing what onces worked that we have forgot to go back into the trenches and try new things? My fear is that if we continue this way, Agile will soon be the next CMM (at least the bad implementations of it, which is most common).

If you are interested in some background about where I’m coming from, you can read my position paper for the Agile Coach Camp.

Directi has launched its first Treasure Hunt http://th.directi.com/. The target audience for this treasure hunt are the participants of the Great Indian Developer Summit. Hopefully we will come up with many more such contests to help us build a stronger community of software professionals in India.

On similar lines we are planning a series of contests focused on Software Design, UX, Testing, etc.  Watch out the Directi wiki for updates.