Re: With Agile methods, we are measuring the right things


Laurent Bossavit wrote:
Mark,

I find this 'no blame'/'internal collective responsibility' culture
slightly anachronistic.

I can't figure out what, if anything, we're disagreeing about.

I don't think we are really....

I think I'm querrying a cookbook, top 10 agile commandments.....which
taken literally doesn't really make sense.....the problem with such
shortcuts is that the people have no context in which to apply 'common
sense' and so take them literally.


Could you expand on this "internal" vs "external" distinction ?

Lets say England play USA at football, and England loose, because the
goal keeper let in two complete howlers , a mild shock to English
football pride......

the press ask the manager....

'what went wrong?'
he should say
'we didn't play well enough on the day, they're team was better than
ours'.

they press him on the obvious target of blame the goally and he defends
him, collective responsibility applies....we all have off days....and
don't expect to get sold down the river for it.

he goes back into the team changing room, shouts his head off at the
goally and drops him for the next two matches....possibly even
considers dropping him from the team completely....maybe its the
selection of him as goalkeeper that is at fault.

externally we are all a team......but that does not extinguish personal
failings.

this is common practice in successful sports teams.


Sometimes I write rubbish code.....the best way for me to learn why
it's rubbish and how not to do it again......is to fix it.

Sure. I agree you'll learn best if you spot your mistake and fix it
yourself. What I think hinders learning is an attitude I caricature as
"It's your mess, you clean it up." An attitude that says "You should
already know this stuff."

to a degree yes.....this is what I am saying.....not a blame
culture.......we accept mistakes.....but we do not hide them.....we fix
them and learn.....people that make lots of them, don't get to work on
as many new features as people who don't.


I think there is a balance, if Joe writes some fantastic code, lets all
go to the pub and buy him a drink, if Joe writes a bug, then lets
(collectively) expect him to fix it.

If you only focus on "the bug", then the problem I see is this: Joe's
interests and the team's interests are misaligned. The team want the bug
fixed. Joe wants to work on features.

Joe is not a good team member by the looks of it to me.....if he wants
work on features, he shouldn't keep writing buggy code, it's in his
(and the teams) best interests to learn why its broken.


If you focus on "why Joe wrote a bug in the first place", there is an
alignment. The team wants Joe to be a better coder. Joe wants to be a
better coder.

IOW the bug is not the problem.


I think we largely agree in content if not style.....yes the bug is not
the problem in itself.....but it is a signal, and one of the principles
of 'quality process management' (!), is to attempt to build natural
feedback loops that reinforce quality.

You broke it, you fix it, is such a loop.....Joe may well decide that
actually the bug isn't really his, it's a environmental problem...be it
lack of training, or bad environment....he should then feed that back
into the team.

.

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