Category: change

Agile Layoffs

March 17, 2007 by Artem

Agile processes often enter the organization from the grass roots - from the developers appreciating useful practices and insightful low level managers seeking for ways to help their subordinates. However, if things progress well, at some point the top management might buy the idea of delivering incremental software faster, than the competition, and declare "we are going Agile" or even "we are going AGILE". While the top management support is something to appreciate, there is still a number of issues to be aware of, when restructuring mid to large size organizations. One of the most important changes is the potential career ladder restructuring.

Importance of following the plan

December 20, 2006 by Artem

Any plan is in essence a sequence of actions to be performed in order to achieve a particular goal. Plan acts as some kind of a contract that specifies the agreed way of reaching this goal.

Keeping the plan can be both harmful and useful under different conditions.

In waterfall-based processes people try to specify to death everything before the actual development starts. Plan creation takes huge amounts of time and efforts. Replanning would require similar amount of work. It also might introduce the half-completed features since in waterfall there are no completed features until the very end of the project. No surprise, that waterfall-based processes avoid plan updates as much as possible.

How two hours have to waste two weeks

November 15, 2006 by Artem

Today Joel Spolsky criticized the agile software development methods a hypothetical story by Dmitri Zimine.The story tells about Sarah the programmer, that had to spoil the whole two week iteration by complying to the urgent two hours long request of her project manager.

The issue that bothers Joel and makes him suspicious about the agile camp is the fact that the request could be really urgent and failing to implement it really soon might have cause a huge sale loss.