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

[Oliver Keyes]

On 12 March 2014 16:40, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 7:19 PM, Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder <
> ssnyder at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Matt, I basically agree with you.  The problem is that hundreds of our
>> "customers" do not.  Erik said the other day, "2) We do have a higher
>> tolerance for breaking things".  Do you know who "we" is in that sentence?
>>  Hint:  It's not our "customers".
>>
>> A noisy segment of our customers either don't believe Agile's promise
>> (that frequent and early pain results in better products) in the first
>> place, or they don't care that this is (probably) the best of the available
>> options.  They're saying, "Stop poking me with a stick twice a week".
>>  Agile proponents are saying, "Well, the only alternative is that we stab
>> you with a big knife twice a year".  They are very loudly in favor of
>> "don't poke me at all".
>>
>>
>> TLDR:  When those anti-Agile users discover a proposal to spend half a
>> million dollars a year on making sure that the users keep getting poked
>> with sticks twice a week, then the people in favor of this proposal should
>> not be surprised at the results.
>>
>
> Sherry, thanks for bringing all of this up. I'd like to do as Erik
> suggested and include a 'benefits to end users' (or differently
> titled/similarly intentioned) section to the proposal with the hope of
> addressing this head-on. While I've heard rumors and grumblings about users
> not being so excited by some teams' embrace of agile practices, I haven't
> been a part of nor seen any of those specific conversations. Can you (or
> anyone else) point me to some of those conversations so I have more context
> and a better understanding of the objections?
>
> The objection is pretty self-explanatory; agile is a philosophy that
dictates putting things we strongly suspect, or even know, to be actively
buggy, in front of users. When doing so includes replacing or superseding
core functionality and either forcing or strongly suggesting that users
should use the buggy replacement, users get, ah, pissed. Users like things
that work, and when you replace something that works with something that
doesn't while insisting it'll totally be more usable at some undefined
point in the future we can't pin down because we don't actually know in
detail what we'll be doing more than 2 weeks in advance, they start to
wonder very loudly at our competence.


> --
> Arthur Richards
> Software Engineer, Mobile
> [[User:Awjrichards]]
> IRC: awjr
> +1-415-839-6885 x6687
>
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>


-- 
Oliver Keyes
Product Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
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