Southern Connecticut Agile Meetup with Esther Derby and Matthew Carlson, 22 Nov 2021.
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuZ39j7UE20
- 20 years ago: agile looked like it could help, but there were no models to follow - you had to look into things and adapt to your context.
- People who wanted to try new things, to experiment, have a core identity as "innovator".
- Looking for a new and better way to do things.
- At the other end of the scale are extreme late adopters.
- These are people who aren't going to adopt something unless it has extreme legitimacy pressure.
- If their entire profession changes around them, and the norms that people expect from them change, then they'll look for new models.
- Or, when they just don't know what to do, tried processes and ideas no longer work, they'll look for something else to help.
- For all these reasons: it's the legitimacy that they're looking for.
- For more: diffusion of ideas, organisational theory.
Feels like agile's less well defined now: XP (widely used years ago) was pretty presecriptive, now it's easy to say you "do agile" and that's fairly vague.
- XP "didn't win".
- Early on, in the "crossing the chasm" phase, a few dominant forms emerge. You don't hear much about Crystal Clear any more, and little about XP.
- People tend to adopt the visible parts: what's easy to see, easy to make explicit, easy to copy.
- They don't adopt: difficult, complex, changing the way you think about things.
- George Dinwiddie: "They may take on visible forms of a process without realizing the intent of those forms."
XP requires fairly deep changes. Scrum on the other hand:
- Seems like it was designed very cleverly to be taken up without necessarily changing much about the way you do things (probably wasn't intentionally designed that way!)
- Affords the option to inspect and adapt, also affords the option not to - they both feel equally possible.
- It's easier to take on Scrum than to start using rigorous XP.
- Don't think the creators of Scrum had too much say in the wide adoption and legitimacy it gained - much the same as the creators of XP didn't have much say in theirs.