An Agile Tragedy: The Agile Practitioner Visits the Wine Store

Date: 2011 Conference: ACCN 2011 Slides: slideshare.net/totto

A comedy in slides. Nine different agile practitioners walk into a wine store and try to buy wine for a dinner with a specific menu — starter: foie gras, main: grilled sirloin steak, dessert: cheese platter. Each approaches the task through the lens of their chosen methodology. None of them do it quite right.

The cast

The talk works through a set of recognisable archetypes, each caricatured just enough to land the point:

• The Freshman Agile Practitioner — enthusiasm without understanding
• The Kanban Practitioner — visualising the flow of wine selection
• The Peer-Programming Team — two people, one bottle, much discussion
• The Code Dojo Evangelist — the process is the point
• The Agile Code-Quality Geek — must measure the wine first
• The Hot-Shot Wannabee — framework-hopping in search of credibility
• The Pomodoro Enthusiast — 25 minutes per wine region, then a break
• The Value-Stream Agile Practitioner — mapping the end-to-end wine journey
• Kent Beck — does it properly

The point

Agile techniques are genuinely useful. They help — part of the way. But the effectiveness of any technique depends entirely on the people implementing it. There are no silver bullets and no golden shortcuts.

It is the people that matter, not the techniques.

The talk is a gentle but pointed critique of methodology cargo-culting: teams that adopt the ceremonies and vocabulary of agile frameworks without developing the judgement those frameworks were meant to support.

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