InfoQ Homepage Presentations Agile Quality: A Canary in a Coal Mine
Agile Quality: A Canary in a Coal Mine
Summary
Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber spoke at Agile2006 on code quality as a corporate asset. InfoQ presents video of his talk, The Canary in the Coalmine. Schwaber discussed how a degrading core codebase paralyses a team and negates any Agility gained through process improvement. He proposed strategies for management to identify, track and stop this downward spiral.
Bio
Ken Schwaber (www.controlchaos.com) codeveloped Scrum with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s. A 30-year IT veteran and an Agile Manifesto signatory, he subsequently founded the AgileAlliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to training and supporting Scrum practitioners.
Community comments
A ray of hope
by Cameron Purdy,
The importance of Transparency and Ethics
by Noah Campbell,
Re: The importance of Transparency and Ethics
by Deborah (Hartmann) Preuss,
Re: The importance of Transparency and Ethics
by Noah Campbell,
A ray of hope
by Cameron Purdy,
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I tend to disagree with a lot of the Agile(tm) Consultants(tm) and Speakers(tm), but I really do like the core idea that one can view "Code Quality as a Corporate Asset". Whether or not one can have get "the CEO [to come] into the room and [say]" anything seems about as far-fetched as the other Schwaberisms, but we (anyone writing code -- even test code and example code) should always view "Code Quality as a Corporate Asset", and we should also view it as our craft, i.e. we should build it with great pride of worksmanship.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Cache
The importance of Transparency and Ethics
by Noah Campbell,
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Great presentation!
I have to admit that I too find the Agile(tm) Consultants(tm) and Speakers(tm) to be a bit underwhelming in their rhetoric. Scrum as a management process is what usually draws me to these presentations and the key to this presentation is that Scrum builds in transparency into the process. That's not to say that RUP, Waterfall, etc. can have equal transparency, but short iterations do put the spotlight on potentially ugly practices...and that's the key to the this presentation. What do you do when presented with difficult decisions?
In Beck and Schwaber's words: have the courage to do the ethical thing.
Re: The importance of Transparency and Ethics
by Deborah (Hartmann) Preuss,
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We can add: a good process cannot hide or compensate for a lack of coaching ethics. We need good processes and good people. If forced to choose... recent experience suggests: go with the good people :-)
Re: The importance of Transparency and Ethics
by Noah Campbell,
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Hopefully you're never forced to choose. I think your point about going with good people as a safe bet is that someone will emerge as a leader and put a process in a place.