Tag: fail

I’m not a child…

Dear Manager,

I am one of your developers, when you hired me you treated me with respect, you asked me about my skills and abilities and (I assume) hired me because of these. Please could you explain to me why, now, the respect is gone and I’m being treated like a mentally deficient child?

If you want me continue adding value please consider the following:

  1. I am not 6 years old, stop treating me like a child.
  2. Using fear, intimidation and sarcasm to control me does not work, the more you try the more I will resist. Try a little more collaboration and a little less intimidation…
  3. If you would like me to tell the truth, don’t force me to lie by shouting at me every time I tell you the truth.
  4. Stop rejecting reality and inserting your own version of it, this is a sign of insanity.
  5. If you force me into a corner, I will lie to get out (see point 3).
  6. If you want me to be responsible, give me ownership of the problem AND the solution and stop telling me what to do by when.
  7. Stop treating me like the “bad guy” and take responsibility for your bad management decisions.
  8. I’m not giving my opinion to irritate you, I’m giving it in an attempt to add value. After all, you hired me for my expertise, right?
  9. Respect that I am a person, not a robot or a number, and that I have a life outside of work.

regards,

A. Developer

Are you really Agile?

I found this interesting article by James Shore:The Decline and Fall of Agile which essentially talks along the subject of people claiming to be “agile” but are not really and having this potentially destroying the true “agile” drive. People should be careful that they don’t just grab at buzzwords and ideas without realizing what they’re getting in to, especially with Scrum:

“But because Scrum works in short cycles and doesn’t include any engineering practices, it’s very easy for teams using Scrum to throw out design. Up-front design doesn’t work when you’re using short cycles, and Scrum doesn’t provide a replacement. Without continuous, incremental design, Scrum teams quickly dig themselves a gigantic hole of technical debt”

Read the full article, it was an eye-opener for me, and be careful, Scrum alone does NOT make you fully agile, it’s only a small step towards agility.

Silos

Someone told me something interesting the other day…”Silo’s destroy Scrum”, which I found interesting but never fully understood the impact until today. We’re approaching the end of our sprint and only one of the stories has been completed, a severe bottleneck was building up with the test work and when the team approached the “tester” within the team that was assigned to us with the offer to have them help out with testing, they were told that only she is allowed to “sign off” testing. I explained that this would cause the sprint to fail because there’s no way she could sign everything off in the remaining time but they were not interested, I guess they’re more interested in sticking to their silo’s than the project succeeding. There’s not much more I can do about this other than to point out that the sprint will fail and just let them fail…