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

Wed Mar 5 03:52:00 UTC 2014

"Don't poke me at all", for most of them, means "do not ever release
software that contains bugs that they will personally experience".  For
another subset, it means never making any UI changes.  It's a thoroughtly
unrealistic position, but those are their real opinions.

If you want to reduce "misunderstandings" by this segment of the userbase,
then you might consider re-writing your very public proposal to identify
any potental benefits to end users, e.g., by increasing the thoroughness of
QA work by relieving some people of non-technical duties.

Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 7:33 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> On 03/04/2014 09:19 PM, Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder wrote:
>
>> 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".
>>
>
> If "don't poke me at all" means "don't change the software", that
> obviously won't happen, regardless of whether this new group is created.
>  "wiki" means quick, so while we can discuss the best software release
> frequency, we should be able to agree it's not "almost never".
>
>
>  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.
>>
>
> That's not what the proposal is.  The proposal has nothing to do with
> release frequency, which is a separate issue.  By way of illustration, the
> original Scrum guide has one month sprints, but says it's up to the
> organization and team.
>
> The goal of scrum is to improve process in order to produce better
> software more efficiently.  It's only part of that though.  There are
> important complements, such as automated and manual testing, that reduce
> the "poke factor".
>
> No matter how you translate the goal of scrum, though, it's not to blindly
> stick to a particular release frequency (let alone without sufficient
> quality assurance), or to deliberately annoy users.  That's neither the
> goal of scrum, nor our goal.
>
> Let's discuss the proposal on its own merits, not based on possible
> misunderstandings of it.  We can communicate what the proposal is really
> about to minimize (but not eliminate) such understandings.
>
>
> Matt Flaschen
>
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