I saw something on a team wiki the other day. Btw, why I was reading a wiki is still a mystery me.
People who use wikis share knowledge to their professional detriment. You should strive to collect as much tacit knowledge about your project in your head (and no where else) as possible. That way, everyone will be forced to rely on you, the one with all the keys. Wikis are for the birds. But I digress.
As a strict student of WACD, I was horrified to see this:
In case you can’t already tell, we are a seriously team-oriented group. As such, we strongly encourage collaborative development and high levels of communication. To achieve this as well as high levels of accountability, we use Scrum. Since Scrum is our management and development methodology, ideally, you’ve taken or you will take a Scrum Master certification course. Otherwise, our mad methods may leave bewildered, daily.
To manage the minimum requirement docs we need, we use Thoughtworks’ Mingle. If you’re reading this page, go ahead and add it to your resume now (I’ll wait…).
We use a concept called Personas to identify with our users. Personas are those will primarily benefit from anything we build or fix. In Scrum, we pay close attention to the reason why our Personas need anything. In User Story parlance, this is the ”, so that …”.
Eventually, we will become a test-focused development organization. At the time of this writing, sadly for this author, testing is still mostly a manual, herculean effort.
Continuous Integration is another core discipline on our program. Our codebase will be automatically built and any associated tests executed each time Subversion detects a change.
For details about how this project's development is done, see our handy <link to> Developer Guide.
These guys are clearly headed in the wrong direction. With so much collaboration, how can any good WACD developer go off in isolation for a week or two to get work done??
And this accountability stuff is for Nazis. I need anonymity. Anonymity lets me maximize my 'flex' time by focusing most of my heroic effort on the day or two just prior to hand-off. Most of the time prior to this wasted slack time anyway.
Oh, and the fact that they're not test-focused, to true WACD disciples, isn't a bad thing - it's a great thing! Why change this?? Testing is superfluous and inefficient when you have a cowboy or two like me on your staff.
Once in awhile you run across anti-WACD stuff like this. It's worth pointing out so that the rest of us aren't misled and can all learn from others' over-hyped forays into agile foolishness.
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