LinLog

While catching up on Jason Gorman's blog today, I came across this entry, which linked to the Half-Arsed Agile Manifesto. In a word, it's awesome.

That manifesto made me think back to when I started my current job. I was reading through the process documentation for our parent company (whose processes the spin-off I work for inherited). The documents referred to themselves as describing the "agile" process the company employed. But as I read through them, with the descriptions of requirements documents and formal hand-off procedures, I just kept thinking, "This sounds a lot more like waterfall than any agile process I've ever heard of." It's always nice to know you're not alone in having experiences like that.

Sadly, while my team's current Scrum-like process is considerably more agile, we still have some vestiges of that. For instance, the stated expectation that our initial estimates will be 90% accurate based on what is (very) generously described as "80% definition" by product management. So we're only mostly sure what we're building, but we're almost positive how long it will take. I'm still not sure how the math is supposed to work out on that. Fortunately, we don't take that expectation too seriously.