Good Agile, Bad Agile
I don’t usually preview my future posts, but this morning I came across this post from Steve Yegge. I haven’t even finished digesting it, but you should go read it right now. I’ll wait…. go now and read … then come back.
… …
Welcome back. Did any of that sound familiar? If it didn’t, then roam around here for a while and see what you think. Seems to me Steve has stumbled upon pliant by accident. Nothing like independant thoughts to strengthen pliant resolve.
I’ll post some more later, since Steve has some good points and some great quotes. I’ll leave you with the quote at the beginning of the post and my recommendation to go read the post again.
Scrums are the most dangerous phase in rugby, since a collapse or inproper engage can lead to a front row player damaging or even breaking his neck.
— Wikipedia
on September 28th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
What I find really interesting about this is that even though he goes on about how many incentives there are at Google and how that drives people to produce, I think the real strength of Google (and any “Google agile”) is having the right people. If you have people who are in this business for the love of it, they are going to want to solve the hard problems. They are going to work on those problems as much as they can, and they will be solved as fast as they can. This is not something that is really easy to measure, plan for, or even track.
This doens’t mean that those people have to be coding all the time, but they will be the type of people that even if they are at home spending quality time with the kids, and doing a good job with the whole work/life balance thing, if they have a revelation about a problem in the middle of the night, they are at least going to write it down.
I think the REAL thing that the monetary incentives do at Google is allow them to attract the type of people they want away from whatever it is they are doing right now.