[teampractices] [Engineering] Feedback requested on proposal for creation of Agile Specialist Group

[Ori Livneh]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Personally, I believe deeply, with great conviction, that we are in a
> *much* better place as a result of all of this than when I started at the
> WMF nearly 4 years ago. I think we have a long way to go, and indeed will
> have eternal room for improvement. I am confident that continuing our
> trajectory and embracing the proposal for the ASG will make us stronger and
> help us get there faster.
>

I think so too, so I'm happy to see this take shape. A lot of the
literature around software development methodologies strikes me as
intellectually suspect, but at the same time I've seen you coordinate
meetings and sprints and I think that you do so with considerable poise,
and the results are effective. So having some organizational structure in
place to make it possible for you to share these skills and practices with
others makes sense to me.

I'd like it if 'Agile' was not hard-set in the title of the team. Agile is
not the only game in town, and it doesn't always work. At the same time,
everyone needs support with establishing processes and coordinating the
social and organizational dimensions of software development, and it'd be
great if engineers could turn to you for that. The way I imagine that
working is that you would provide the coaching yourself if it fell under
the rubric of agile or scrum, but that you'd also be able to provide an
overview of additional approaches, and perhaps maintain a list of external
resources that you could refer people to.
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