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The Most Important Agile Practice Of All

skorks.com

14 pointsaskorkin9 comments

It's very hard to respect people while trying to get them to work when they aren't working as hard as you are and aren't as capable.

It gets a lot easier when your team mates are at least working as hard as you are, or if they're on the same page knowledge- or skill-wise.

hmm.

this single-minded expectation makes sense if all of you sat down early in the project and agreed to share this perspective. let's suppose you also level-headedly discussed how to handle deviations from this expectation, but somewhere in the implementation things went awry and now you feel like your trust in humanity is gone.

it would also make sense if you have a broad definition of what it means to "work hard" and "be capable", and, again, your sense of trust has been substantially undermined.

otherwise, it sounds like you only respect people exactly like you. i don't think that makes for a strong team.

This is the exact opposite of Respect. If you only respect people who are like you, you respect no one. We are all different and have different circumstances. You can't accurately measure team member's output at any given moment, as it fluctuates and depends on so many factors. Respecting someone means (in the agile context) trusting their good intentions and willingness to do everything they can for the success of the team/business. And guess what, it's not hard at all. Oh, and it's contagious too.

What do you do when they aren't willing to do a lot, and don't have great intentions, but rather the intent to just slip by with "good enough"?

I view "respect" less as a fluffy handy wavy answer, and more of a super general meta answer. It's almost a cop-out, except that I completely agree that The Most Important Collaboration Practice is respect.

I live in a coop with very little conflict because we strive to respect our multiple perspectives. My husband is also my partner on multiple (serial) startups. The heart of working with people, and thus multiple perspectives, styles and experiences, is respect. How else could one properly listen, learn and share?

Feel-good bullshit.

Feedback is the most important agile practice.

If you're not respectful, other team members will tell you and you're gone.

If you're not delivering, other team members will tell you and you're gone.

Agile is about conversations, and conversations are about feedback. Respect is a big part of that, but you could have a team of high-performing assholes and they'd do just fine. As long as everybody is providing feedback and acting on it.

I wouldn't want to be on the team, but it'd all work out.

As a counter-example, I've seen extremely respectful teams get zero performance. Everybody was so nice that nobody actually fixed things that were broken -- nobody wanted the conflict. On the other hand, I've seen teams that had low respect and high conflict that did very well.

Good agile teams are like families. That's both a good and bad thing.

The Most Important Agile Practice Of All?

"Remember to shut up about Agile for a minute and write some damned code!"

Most people I know are more than capable of discussing Agile techniques/practices and writing plenty of code at the same time, the two are not mutually exclusive :).

Oh, certainly - I was just (flippantly, I admit) pointing out that I'm fairly sick of hearing about programming methodology X or Y. I have nothing against the practices themselves, mind - just chalk it up as a friendly bout of HHOS.

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