Yoo 610 - Work Talk...Agile

I think these are the only two pictures I've taken on my camera in the past two months. Dork dog has a question in the last one. Can he go outside? And is it food time?

Just a minute pups, I need to talk about work. Specifically, my feelings on "Agile".

First, Agile ruins google searches for agile. Now, instead of pictures of athletes and cheetahs, I get pictures of sticky notes and process charts. There's one cheetah, but it's a hefty scroll down and only a picture of a cheetah on a book cover titled "The Business Value of Agile Software Methods".

Second, I would probably like this method more if team member roles were compared to those of the A-Team instead of a monarchy where project stakeholders and managers are the royals/aristocrats and everyone else is in the peasant working class.

I'm doing the same work no matter how you slice and dice the process, but it's just way cooler to pretend I'm working as part of the A-Team and not as a kitchen maid on Downton Abbey.

Third, the agile coach. On an athletic team? Yes. On a software development team? This seems like a bad idea. Add a resource to the project that has no deliverables and no stake in the project and allow them to offer critical feedback? Sure! It'll inspire and boost team morale!

Fourth, I still think this whole method was developed by Post-It to prevent their sticky note extinction. Create a demand. Is this a Harvard business case study? It should be.

Fifth, the daily stand ups are still not efficient. They're supposed to be because we're standing up and that theoretically serves as a reminder to give a quick status to get back to sitting. But they go on too long! My idea is for the project manager, sorry SCRUM MASTER, to bring a pizza to every standup. If a person honestly keeps their status report to 30 seconds, they get a slice.

That's such a great idea and I should be getting paid for this.

What other work thoughts do I have?

Oh yes, ALWAYS HANDLE YOUR NULLS IN DATASTAGE. I lost most of my Fourth of July weekend digging for one row out of eight million because of a null-handling issue. Only I didn't know it was a null-handling issue until hours and hours into the debugging process. They're sneaky like that. Also, it wasn't actually my code so, cherry on top. At least if I had developed it I could kick myself at the end of the long weekend. But nope! I had to harbor ill-feelings towards a person I didn't even know and that isn't bringing me any steps closer to heaven.

Isn't work talk fun?

I will say that I have a lot of fun with the people I work with and can't complain about my team at all. Best part of going to work. And all the "complaining" aside, my company is awesome and my job is only horrible on Wednesdays and the first week of the month. I don't know why Wednesdays but the first of the month is when my main marketing applications run and that's just like waiting for a bomb to go off.

To a million more years of this!

Have a great day :-)