For me, lots of projects have some degree of grind or frustration or irritation. There’s not one project I could point to and say that was just delicious through and through. I think Agile sets out to solve a big bunch of problems, but I think there’s something underlying that set of problems. There’s something about western culture that trains them not to do certain things. If I do something that of that smell or feel, there’ll be a big wrongness coming my way. People slowly learn not to do certain things.
The classic with this was that we’d talked and talked and talked about doing automated testing. It was almost like “Well, it can’t be done, or it would be really hard to do.” Eventually I was sick of this. There was one engineer on the team who was as interested as I was in doing it. So I just said to my boss, “Not going to be doing much for the next week.” He was like “What do you mean?” I said “Just leave me alone, give me some space.” So we went and we did it and we set up. We showed everyone else and they were like “Oh right, cool.” Not like “Wow!” or anything, they were just like “Oh cool.” And then they started copying it. At the end they just completely threw out our framework and developed their own one that the testers could use. Ours was all programmer-based, so they changed it into XML scripts that the testers could write and understand. But it was just that `stuckness’ and it’s the same at this new place: people are stuck and I don’t understand it.
delicious
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