Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

Scott Sehlhorst, as always, has some interesting insights into the software development process. He argues this week that Agile is sometimes used by developers to hide or absolve themselves of responsibility, but that the opposite is true. Agile actually increases accountability by preventing a ‘throw it over the wall to QA’ culture and by promoting developer ‘ownership’ over features and quality.

Read the full post here.

I’ll admit that I’m not an Agile expert and I don’t understand a lot of it yet, but in a recent project I saw this responsibility-dodging behavior on an Agile team, and I think the culture of supremacy of developers over project coordinators preventing anyone from calling them out. The scrum-model is a short rapid-fire way of tracking team progress, but the flip-side is you get the perception of transparency but in fact only get a surface-level view of what the developer is actually doing. When things are not going right in a project, developers are able to cut features and push timelines, unfairly shifting the burden onto project coordinators who then have to deal with the client. The failure of the project coordinator in this case was that they didn’t notice or seem to mind that the developers had the same goals day after day and didn’t make progress. What’s funny is these people would rephrase their goals each day but say exactly the same thing. That’s a fault of the coordinator, not the model, but even if they did notice, what could they really do about it. In a room full of many people who is going to step forward and say ‘hey! you’re full of crap!’