Agile Scotland

Last night I attended an Agile Scotland prescentation by Ben Fuchs and Joseph Pelrine(http://www.metaprog.com/blogs/)on the Social and Psycological Challenges of Agile Development. It was a very interesting talk taking the form of an Agile project. Questions were gained requested from the floor, costed by the speakers and prioritised by the audience with a show of hands. The topic covered everything from "How to deal with problem personalities" to "Agile Communism". The whole talk was good but the two highlights for me were the story of the bees and Joseph berating Agile by the book.

Joseph said that if you're doing Agile by the book then you're not doing Agile at all. Agile is about continuiosly looking at and improving your process. The book is just a starting point. If you're doing 10, 11 or 12 of the practices it doesn't matter, what matters is if you're using these techniques to ship high software faster and better than ever before.

The story of the bees was told by Ben Fuchs. I'm not sure where he got it but it's a story about organisations and their model of sustainability. It goes like this. When a Bee finds pollen it returns to the hive and does a dance to let the other bees know where the pollen is. Most of the bees, about 80%, head off to collenct the pollen from the new source. Most but not all. 20% fly off in random directions scouting for new sources of pollen. If those 20% didn't look for future sources then the hive would starve. If 100% of the bees gathered the pollen there would be no new sources of pollen and the hive would die.

Here is another blog covering the talk that Ben and Joseph are giving throughout the country http://jw.fi/2006/03/17/agile-complexity-and-friends/

Thanks to Clarke and Agile Scotland for arranging this event.