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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

Why would you say that whole sentence when you can just say "sprint"?

Sprint is jargon and jargon alienates newcomers. One of the goals of this team is to teach the government a new way of working.

The article title would be much better as:

> "How a two-day cross-functional team moved an agency twenty years forward"

I'll go even further and say that Agile terminology should be avoided as much as possible, as we have already seen it corrupted into anti-Agile in the enterprise. Stick to the basics (short work cycles, cross-functional teams, clear explicit goals, quick constant feedback, etc) and a new organization will better maintain the true intent of Agile, rather than mindlessly cargo-culting the structures (sprint, iterations, agile team, scrum board, etc).

>as we have already seen it corrupted into anti-Agile in the enterprise

I've definitely experienced this. A large waterfall development group decides to call themselves Agile. They start proclaiming their mutant fast-waterfall as the One True Agile, adopting terms and structures to appear Agile.

Then you get invited to the hour-long "standups" attended by dozens of un-involved people, "stories" that amount to poorly worded system requirements, "grooming sessions" filled with chickens and "sprints" with development/release cycles that look oddly similar to what we had before they started calling themselves Agile.

It's just a rapid waterfall. Call it "rapid waterfall," or just keep calling it "waterfall" and increase your velocity. It confuses things when people that have worked in Agile shops come around and try to understand what you're doing.

Sidenote - I'd probably title the article "How a ten-person team moved a government agency forward twenty years in two days."

The permalink says "spring" so "sprint" is an improvement on the draft title anyhow. :)

But despite the piled-on bogosity, it still achieves some measure of incremental development. And because of this, it also achieve some measure of flexibility.

Which are two of the main benefits of Agile (the third being efficiency due to process refinement).

So as far as enterprisey stuff goes, it's really not that (relatively) bad.

You're right, it's not that bad from a delivery perspective. We're getting some stuff faster than before. To some degree my frustration is in the semantics. It does get practical when bringing someone onboard who has worked in a traditional Agile shop and it's like re-learning everything to figure out what we're doing.

It's possible to teach new ideas without using new words, but I don't think it's unreasonable to include new terms to indicate the new ideas.

"Sprint" and "agile" are googlable. There is a stable body of literature to support a person adopting the terms when communicating about workflow processes...even a person who doesn't agree with their utility has the opportunity to at least know exactly what they are objecting to.

"Sprint" connotates a methodology. "Cross functional team" barely describes personnel vaguely.

Amen! Can i get a witness!

"Project", "period", "effort", and other words are less techie/jargon sounding and communicate the idea.

"Project" has a lot of baggage with the audience, and implies a lot of things that the approach here is in contrast to, so would be particularly bad.

"Period" doesn't connote activity, just time, so its not a great name for an activity.

"Effort" is a perfectly generic name for an activity, and carries no connotations related to what is special about this activity; even (perhaps especially to those unfamiliar with its use in software development jargon) "sprint" carries connotations of a fast, focused effort over a short time frame, which is quite appropriate here.

I think they lose a lot of the meaning. And it's not like the government has any aversion to jargon! If we called it a "cyber-sprint" they'd eat it right up.

Agreed, but this wasn't really about Agile methodology as much as the generic notion of fast iteration, which can certainly exist outside a specific agile regimen. From my experience, if your government audience is not already familiar with a piece of jargon, then introducing it risks 1) distracting from what you're actually trying to communicate, 2) giving them a false sense of understanding that will later be unintentionally used as a bludgeon against you or others in some planning meeting (a slightly caricaturish example: "No! Sprints are two days, why are you doing two week sprints!?").

"Sprint" only says the "short-term goal" part (along with "unsustainable pace"). You have to infer the "working session" part from context, and "cross-functional team" isn't even suggested by "sprint". And maybe you could even ditch the "unsustainable pace" part.

Yeah it's jargon, but kzhahou's complaint was that it wasn't complex enough.

My comment is not related to whether or not it is jargon or whether someone is going to confuse this kind of "sprint" with literal running. Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment by mistake, or just have no idea what I'm talking about.

I don't think anyone is going to confuse a "sprint" for literal running. You're going to have to learn the new term just like any other word: either from context or being given a definition.

Not everybody knows what the word "sprint" means in this context. (And it's not entirely a positive connotation-- after all, people can only sprint for so long before they collapse.)

Hence why you have short sprints before you 'take a break' (of zero days) and start again.

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