[melbourne-pug] Agile

Thu Feb 4 02:34:17 EST 2016

Sound advice – you need to at least show that you’re an advocate of such practices and principles… All the best, John

John Knight, Tequity - Company Director & Tech Agent

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From: melbourne-pug [mailto:melbourne-pug-bounces+john.knight=tequity.com.au at python.org] On Behalf Of Bianca Gibson
Sent: Thursday, 4 February 2016 6:14 PM
To: Melbourne Python Users Group <melbourne-pug at python.org>
Subject: Re: [melbourne-pug] Agile

Hi Brian,

I think they should be assessing your willingness to adopt agile and how much the values resonate with you, not years of agile experience. From what I've seen whether the resume says 'agile experience' or not doesn't necessary tell us whether they get agile at all - some candidates have been told that their team is agile when it really isn't. If you've got compatible attitudes you can pick it up pretty easily. 
I'd suggest looking in to agile more, and if you're specifically interested in agile then put something about moving to an agile environment in your cover letter or a blurb at the top of your resume. Draw some links between stuff you've done and agile principles that you can bring out in interviews. If you'd be interested in joining us at realestate.com.au <http://realestate.com.au>  please contact me off list, we have positions available I'd be happy to talk to you about :)

Cheers,

Bianca

On Wed, 3 Feb 2016 at 01:37 Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com <mailto:jonmmorgan at gmail.com> > wrote:

Hi David,

On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 1:28 AM, David Nugent <deeprave at gmail.com <mailto:deeprave at gmail.com> > wrote:

Hi Brian,

Just my 2c worth...

Like yourself, I've worked in this industry a lot of years, and
personally found that the word "agile" is very overloaded. In fact, the
term itself is just a broad methodology of incremental development that
is in no way industry specific, and it covers a few variant disciplines.

I agree.  I have worked in several "agile" environments (both good and bad).  All incremental, but none of them have born much resemblance to the Scrum sheet earlier in this thread.  In my current job, we follow all four of the fundamental agile manifesto "We prefer A over B" - and I like that.  We don't do Scrum, and I don't mind that.  Maybe not all our practices are perfect, but they work for us and our customers, and that's kinda more important than having the right "agile" tick.

It feels like it wasn't too many years ago when Extreme Programming was the one everyone talked about.  Now Scrum seems the one.

To me, one of the important things is choosing an agile process for the right reasons.

When I was in Uni, "agile" meant "Not having to do all the annoying massive design documents our lecturers said we should do".

I've seen "extreme programming" used to mean "Let's just ignore the design of the system and see what happens when we wing it"  (hint: XP has checks and balances that are meant to guide the design while keeping it simple...)

Yes, I've seen issues with massive documents and unwieldy design up front, and I'd much prefer not to do either of those things.

But the process has to be picked to try and develop better software and be more responsive to the customer's needs, not because of laziness or buzzword compliance.

But what most call "agile" in the software industry is a discipline
called "scrum"; referring to a highly collaborative team-based approach
that follows a particular set of principles and role structure. In
practice, workplaces implement it slightly differently, with various
degrees of success, depending on the personalities and capabilities of
those involved.

While there's certainly something to be learned from adopting an agile
approach, it isn't the utopia that some make it out to be. It takes
people to drive it, and at the end of the day it's people and not the
process that gets stuff done.

Good call.

I'd just stress again that in many industries a lot of the "people" you work with or that influence the decisions will be customers, not developers, and they will have a big say into whether agile meets their needs and what the process should look like.

Jon

> > "... as long as the candidate showed a willingness to operate in an
> > agile way."
>
> Hmmm. Wonder if I need to be better at communicating this. Just a
> thought.
> --
> Brian May <brian at linuxpenguins.xyz <mailto:brian at linuxpenguins.xyz> >
> https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/

Regards,
--
David Nugent (deeprave at gmail.com <mailto:deeprave at gmail.com> )

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