AgilePracticeLibrary

Programmer Anarchy

notes from Fred George [video]

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WHY

• Agile = social change, especially beyond software groups in organizations
• Programmer Anarchy grows out of ‘’story tyranny,’’ the drive to micromanage agile work

• Requirements hierarchy:
  • initiatives
  • products/projects
  • features
  • stories
  • tasks

• PA wants to elevate customer conversations to the feature level, to get clients out of complexity’s way
• normal agile evolves toward micromanaging at task level and standups

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WHAT - ROLES

agile roles

• management - project mgr, iteration mgr
• development - developer
• business - customer, QA, BA

PA moves to all customers and developers, only

• QA - need real programming skills now, and architecture skills as shift from acceptance testing to active monitoring
• BA - just a middleman in conversation, a redundant intermediary
• iteration manager - role invented by thoughtworks for a specific situation, same as project manager
• project manager - overloaded term/role: from clerk to leader, ambassador to coach/mentor, concierge to power hungry boss - team can handle these better for themselves.

PA evolved as a way to go faster - published a number of updates and started killing processes that got in the way, without loss of safety => looked like “anarchy” but it worked great!

WHAT - PRACTICES

• agile practices NOT used: standups, story narratives, retrospectives, estimates, iterations, MANDATORY pairing, unit tests, acceptance tests, refactoring, patterns, continuous integration
• instead: trust w/ co-location, results not blame, small short-lived apps, and continuous deployment

WHAT - SHIFTS

• project focus => feature focus
• specialists => poly-skilled
• desks => team tables

• scrum => aggressive agile, table-based teams and people moving around, choosing their own tables (looks like ongoing open space!) => flexible project approach
• change tech stack
• key business tech = platform/languages/software delivery to assess skills

• titles and job descriptions gone. people focus. master/journeyman/apprentice (2 yrs to master, or fail out, 2-6 months to journeyman),
• training in working together: option to join new way of working, incentive because had to join or be stuck w/working in old code base
• new roles... (1) new graduate developer, (2) developer, (3) senior dev (speicialized) and systems dev(polyskilled), (4) master (3+ key skills)