Last week I was pointed at the CHAD page which told me that Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers would be in town giving a talk on “Pragmatic Agility”. Now, I’ve heard of the agile methodology and had mostly written it off as people attempting to quantify “making the right decisions”. Now, I agree with that analysis even more.
Andy Hunt was an excellent speaker. He told fun stories, looked at his audience, stayed fairly on-topic, and managed the wing-nuts in the crowd with aplomb.
Of the items I took away from the presentation, most important was the idea of iterations. Do very short iterations that give you a full product…something you can use and test.
I also heard things that I wholeheartedly appreciated and agreed with. One of the slides nearer the beginning of Andy’s presentation was one speaking of customer collaboration—over contract negotiation. Include your customer in the process. Make sure they are with you every step of the way. And the need for contracts, documents, and assurances will be lessened. At the end of such collaborative projects, everyone will feel that the project met their own goals and agendas.
Lastly, Andy Hunt spoke of the Broken Windows theorem, perhaps most famously used by then-Mayor Giuliani when he ordered N.Y.C. police to pay attention to even the smallest thing. If it’s broken, get it fixed as quickly as possible. Andy applied this to your projects by saying that if there isn’t a single broken thing, no one sees a place to pile other broken things when they find them, so those broken things tend to get fixed rather than piled together.
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