Thursday, January 24, 2008

Gerry Laybourne on agile

From an interview with Gerry (page 6, scroll about halfway down the page):

"...And through that, I really got to know them and decided that I really wanted to understand agile management—which is a very interesting way of managing. It's a very formal discipline that allows the team to own the work. And what happens in software development is that you can give an assignment to a software-development team, and then six months later, they deliver what the assignment was. And you look at it and say, "Oh no, that's not what I wanted." In agile management, you work on a two-week cycle. You're working. You have a "scrum master." You have priorities set. You agree on what the priorities are in the meeting. You review the priorities. You evaluate where you are, and you move to the next step..."

I love that she knows agile is a "very formal discipline."

1 comment:

Christopher Bennage said...

I wish more people knew that. When I was at Microsoft event last fall, at a mixer party, and explaining to the president of another software shop that my company used agile methodologies, he responded by saying "yeah, mine too, documentation is worthless, I just let my guys get to work". After a few more moments of digging in conversation I discovered that that was in fact the full extent of his understanding of agile. (!)