Flow Manifest(o)
flowmanifest.org
flowmanifest.org
Axiom 8 is the most important.
Which is to say, when you make a 'common sense' judgment, you are typically making a judgment based on gut/intuition. You are accessing your onboard neural network, which was trained against the corpus of your entire life, rather than some rule you don't feel in your bones.
There are many problems with this, but for now, let's notice that intuitions honed at one level might not work on another. For example, intuitions about household debt are famously bad intuitions to apply to U.S. federal debt. So looking for e.g. commonsense solutions to the U.S. debt will probably not work -- you simply won't find one that feels right. This is because you (dear reader) are stochastically unlikely to have much experience in running a country.
An analogous problem occurs in software. And what the intuition cannot usefully reason about, it must cede to systems and algorithms, all of which, by definition, feel 'un-intuitive', because they are literally substituting for your nonexistent and/or offtopic intuitions.
Simply put, most peoples' intuition cannot scale, because the training corpus of most people does not include examples of sufficient scale, so they are stuck blindly applying rules and hoping for the best.
There's just no substitute for experience, but scrum afficionados try anyway ;D
Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated
Citation needed. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. And half of the suggestions in that twitter thread (keeping the metric private, changing it over time) seem to point in the direction of actually not having a metric and relying on human judgement instead.
Indeed. This is Goodhart’s Law.
Unless you think effort spent on the metric increases the total energy of the system, anyway. Personally I would bet it pretty much always decreases it, not even breaking even.
The Agile movement is a movement which read the agile manifesto, said "Well I can't sell that, but I can sell something else and call it that", but it has little in common with the agile movement except name.
Some of the original agile signatories have moved over to the Agile movement.
This almost made me cry.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230212185150/https://flowmanife...
Btw HNers - any here disagree with the 'We believe' page?
It not a knowledge problem, it’s a culture problem.
It is incredibly frustrating to join a new team, point out the very obvious misalignment between agile and what they are doing...
and then become assimilated and just march on becoming part of that same culture.
haha this is so true. It basically always happens unless you walk away
The old maxim is that every human problem has at least two answers: Voice and Exit. Exit is leaving - and you should never take that off the table. But Voice (speaking up, changing the culture around you) is incredibly powerful. Getting good at voice is to get good at leadership.
Strong leaders - at any level in an organisation - can change the culture around them, to a certain extent. For good or ill. Not all culture comes from outside of us. Some, we get to create.
Damn, that's a good way of putting it.
One give away that a company is certified is that it forces them to block merging of all unreviewed pull requests (including ones that were revised after last review).