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Lovin’ it!

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!’

Brian brought this post to my attention [read]. The general story (as I understand it) is this:

One of the MooTools developers, a guy named Olmo, gave a brief talk on the framework, during which he compared it to JQuery, Prototype, and others. This talk was taped, and you can watch it [here]. So in his talk he kindof says he doesn’t really look at the other frameworks that much because he doesn’t have time or whatever.. and he’s more interested in MooTools.. fair enough.

At any rate, he makes some untrue statements about JQuery in particular.. probably out of general not-knowingness, and does a little trashtalking. This got noticed.. some guys complained, and then #@$& hit the fan. Olmo’s been ousted from the Mootools dev team subsequently.. and got totally slammed in the process (in a very public way).

So here’s my take. I think some sort of an apology or correction was definitely in order. It should have come from Olmo, not Valerio. And if Valerio had to do it because Olmo wouldn’t, then I sortof think it’s interesting he slammed Olmo as bad as he did.. I mean this isn’t the first time there’s been a little inter-framework trashtalking. I sortof think when that happens we should just dust ourselves off and keep going. Besides, with respect to Resig, jQuery and all them who I totally respect too, what he said wasn’t really even that bad – not bad enough to get canned anyway.

Can’t we all just get along?