pliantalliance.org

I love it when luminaries in the industry start questioning things. JK passed this one on to me this morning. In the post, Alistair Cockburn describes how he facilitated a work session without yellow sticky notes *gasp*. He used mind-map software instead and apparently it worked great.

He goes on to tell of how when he tried to share his experience with others, he was lectured by the Agilista about how yellow sticky notes are the only true way. Of his admonishers, Cockburn says:

Not that they’ve tried it, just that they’ve locked onto the opinion that yellow post-its are superior to everything else, and therefore to be used on all occasions.

But Cockburn goes on to talk about the bigger picture and the real problem.

I wouldn’t write about this if it was just post-its vs electronic capture. It is more general than that. I see my agile colleagues throwing their personal course-curriculum at clients rather than try to solve the clients problems; throwing Scrum training at them rather than …; throwing agile-in-general at them …; throwing 2-week iterations at them …; in general not thinking about what the client is ailing from before spouting generic agile rhetoric at them and lobbying agile-fad-of-the-day would-be solutions at them.

I wonder if comments like this from people the likes of Cockburn mean post-agilism and pliancy are crossing the chasm?

It has been the policy of the Pliant Alliance to not recommend (or decry) any one particular technique or process to the world. We can’t possibly know enough about what others are doing, how they are doing it, the projects they are working on, the people they are working with or the company and clients they are working for to get anywhere near a useful recommendation. We do point out techniques that people are claiming to be the snake oil of the 21st century and usually attempt to discuss when/where those techniques may or may not work. We do get into arguments about recommending processes without much evidence. But most of all we attempt to encourage people to think, evaluate and change.

Another tenet of the Pliant Alliance has been to encourage continuous learning and improvement of the processes we use through the sharing of experience with each other. This may sound contradictory to the above, but it isn’t. In order to think, evaluate and change, we must have some idea of what others have had success with. You should _never_ take other peoples experience as a guarantee of your success, but stories of success from others give us ideas of where we can improve our own process and techniques. Combine that experience with actually thinking about our own contexts and we are approaching the right trajectory towards software development goodness.

Just because we don’t want to push any one technique on you, doesn’t mean we don’t have opinions. However, those opinions live elsewhere in the blogosphere. With the expectation that you’ll take our experience with a dose of thought and evaluation, here are some blogs you _might_ learn something from.

• Sesquipedalian Spew - my personal blog with tech and software development posts mixed in with other general stuff.
• Collaborative Software Testing - Jonathan Kohl explores software testing issues
• nlg(n) - David Benoit’s “thoughts on why software development is hard, why hard things are interesting, and why easy things are boring.”
• Solve The Real Problem - Brad Spencer’s thoughts on professional software development.

Enjoy.