Thoughts on a revised Agile Manifesto

Today I became aware that there is a movement in the Agile community which has been born out of concern that the Agile Manifesto basicly needs to be updated. The argument goes that core values was forgotten when the manifesto was announced and the manifesto needs to be updated or revised to fit the world of today.

I got curious - so I found an article by Brian Marick, one of the people who is one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. He believes that there are several values such as "skill", "discipline" and "joy" are missing and needs to be clarified as core Agile values. A paragraph from the article explains why "joy" should be a core value:

"Now, I could say that a joyful employee is a productive employee, and that lack of joy on a project is like a canary keeling over in a coal mine: a sign that something big is wrong and you better pay attention. Maybe that’s true. I’d certainly like to believe it. But, fundamentally, I don’t care. I think joy is its own excuse. We deserve it. More to the point, those people around us deserve it. Their work shouldn’t suck any more than yours does, and you have it easily within your power to remove some suckitude."

I agree with him in every word - but the consequences of having the Agile Manifesto updated with terms that requires or expects joy from you in order for you and your team to be agile is a paradox. Agreeing that you are only doing things right when you are enjoying working on a project is like saying that you are failing Agile principles if you don't always have a good time earning your payroll - and that's where my warning signs kick in.

In another article James Shore expresses similar concerns - he calls it the decline of Agile. His concerns are clearly expressed in the following:

"The good Agile--the real Agile--it really works. I've seen it. My colleagues have seen it. It's been repeated hundreds of times, and some of those projects have succeeded for years. But those hundreds of successes will be drowned out by the thousands of failures"

Agile is hard. The rewards you get for being agile isn't something you earn just because it works well for your neighbour. You have to put in a lot of effort and be prepared to fail a lot before you "get it". This is by far the hardest part - to fall on your nose a lot in the beginning without loosing faith. The reason you do it anyway is because you believe in certain values. Agile is a set of values you basicly either can commit to or can’t commit to. The discussions in the community often circles around how organizations are implementing the values of Agile - the ”how to do Agile”. The ”what is Agile” is another discussion which should not be confused with the ”how do we succeed with Agile where I work”.

Why do you and I get out of bed and go to work every day? Ask yourself why - what is the core value that make you set your alarm clock to wake you up before you awake by yourself every morning? It's a simple question, but the answer isn't obvious and requires you to reflect upon your everyday life. The vision for me as a person to go to work every day is that I need to feel independant in order for me to function as a social, human being - so I have an education and go to work because the money I earn there helps me to get closer to that vision. I also believe in love and trust so when I found the one we got married because that was the way for us to make a vision we both share come true. What we do we do because we believe in something – we believe in visions and ideas and everything we do, how we react, the choices we make every day should be connected to core values which we believe in.

The Agile Manifesto is a vision - it describes a set of values, nothing more, nothing less. Discipline, joy etc. are not values as such - adressing discipline and joy when implementing Agile however helps you in making the vision of Agile come true in your work. We don't need to update the Agile Manifesto - we need better skilled, better trained, better educated evangelists who can communicate to the world how Agile is implemented because the values and principles behind Agile are generally accepted, I believe. The decline of Agile that James Shore is blogging about is a matter of people who made the choice of going Agile but don’t ask for help or are not being pushed in the right direction by experienced Agilists when they attempt to implement Agile for the first time. We should address those implementation details in terms of "how to do Agile", not "what is Agile". We don't need to devalue the current principles and guidelines of Agile by upgrading best-practices such as discipline and joy to something they are not – that would indeed be a clear violation of the Single Responsibility Principle, I believe ;o)

/ Regards K.

To TDD or not to TDD

I sat down today and reflected a little on SCRUM and TDD. The two are very alike in many ways and I have strong feelings for both of them because I think they work for me. They are "right" in a way.

Lots of blogs have lists of how you become better at SCRUM. The Nokia test for instance. I haven't however seen a list of how to become better at TDD. TDD is in the community more a "write your tests first and voila - your'e now a TDD developer"... Ehmm.... No, couldn't be farther from the truth. So I sat down and wrote for an hour and came up with the following considering the headline: How do you become better at "to TDD":

• Get the basics right. Spend at least an hour or two and read about TDD. How do you do it? What is the AAA syntax? Testdriven development means that you write your test first. If you don't know why that's crucial to your success as a TDD developer you should read some more before going on a TDD deathmarch.
• Want it. If you want to TDD you want to write your test first. No more "I'll write code and test if afterwards" - if you think like that you don't want to TDD yet.
• Know you will fail when you begin. You will definately suck at it when you first attempt to write tests. You will forget to write your test first - many times. Your code will look different and not "feel" right. Even the smallest problems will be hard to solve because you have to think on writing tests, tests, tests. It feels like the TDD approach hinders you from thinking on the three lines of code that will solve your problem and enable you to close the damn support ticket... Relax. This is perfectly normal. Ask for help and tell that you can't come up with a decent test for this specific problem. If a test is hard to write it is often because the code itself is flawed and has design issues which makes the code hard to test - and you are not able to recognize those code smells at first. Know you will fail - you also fell the first time you rode a bicycle, didn't you?
• Do it even when it's hard. It is easy to fall into the mental trap of "this code is 3 years old and un-tested so writing tests on this crap is overkill for this bugfix". No! You are not being paid to always jump over the fence at the lowest point - and just claiming that a codeblock is too hard to test without having asked for help or considered what it would actually require for you to make it testable ranges somewhere between stupidity and ignorance.
• Do it where it matters the most. If you have a piece of code which is central to your applications or is being called upon everywhere (i.e. that little string utility thingy which is shared across all your VS projects around) and it is untested - test it at all costs.
• Don't do it everywhere. If you have a piece of code which is used for generating reports once or twice a month for one person in the company and a test requires 4 hours of boilerplate work - don't do it, just make the code work.
• Get help. When you fail or things won't work your way - ask for help. It is the second-most crucial thing next to wanting it: Ask for help if you're stuck. Get people who knows how to do things to push you in the right direction. Read books, subscribe to blogs to get more info on how to TDD.

I believe that you will have to want to TDD the same way you will have to "want" to SCRUM because both SCRUM and TDD are basicly a mindset you must adapt to in order to make it work for you. If you want to loose weight you will have to want to not eat so much or you will have to want to exercise some more. Your mother or girlfriend can't make you loose weight nor can any of your teammates or collegues make you want to go TDD on your code. They can and will encourage you just like your family and girlfriend will encourage you to loose weight but it won't work permanently if you don't want it.

When do you know that you're on the right track? You know you want it. Ask yourself that question and if you know you still want to TDD deep inside everything is A-OK. If you don't then focus on getting your motivation back or decide to not to want to TDD. That is perfectly OK as well because why do something that you don't want to do? You can become a very competent coder without ever writing a single unittest. Just be honest with yourself and don't go TDD on your work if you don't believe in it.

To TDD or not to TDD - that really is the question :o)

/ K.

How agile are you?

I always had this sort of weird feeling towards "Take this test to know how lovable / sexy / fat / lucky / suicidal / etc. etc. you are" - however I found myself taking one today and right now I'm advertising for it... So much for standing up to your principles I guess.

Here it is - I got a steady 39 (brag, brag, brag). How agile are you?

/ Kristian