Situated Geekery

Now we have an idea that we’re going to split our day and sit in our own lap, and it’s time for the final piece of the puzzle.

There’s a common thread to the first two parts of the HAHSIYOLPS (HSP) transition. The third element is driven by the same force:

There’s Not Enough Time…

Development teams are never given enough time to build the skills and attitudes we need for agility.

XP is intentionally minimal, but it still has a lot of moving parts.

What about adaptation? Couldn’t we just adapt XP until it’s right for us? Isn’t that a key value of agile systems?

Yes, but there’s a problem. A team that’s new to agile does not have the experience needed for adapting it. (Tho they always try.)

…AKA There’s Too Much Work

Agility itself tells us not to say “there’s not enough time” but instead to say “there’s too much work”. We rarely slip deadline, i.e. time, we just slip scope, i.e. work.

The transition to agile represents a lot of work. We have to solve one helluva lot of challenges at once: legacy code, legacy meetings, legacy priorities, legacy brushfires, legacy matrix management, and yes, legacy process.

We need to generate for ourselves the awesome XP experience, while simultaneously keeping our day jobs afloat.

Me, Looking Down Some Railroad Tracks

Enter The Perfectly Slow Track

The perfectly slow track is a story track in which the team takes as much time as it needs to do perfect agility.

So there are two story tracks: the regular one, and the perfectly slow one. On the regular track, the team does all the stuff they normally do, done the way (mostly) they normally do it.

The perfectly slow (PS) track has these properties:

• work-in-progress (WIP) limit is one story at a time;
• a single dedicated pairing station, ideally with projector;
• guarantee from team it will be worked during all core hours;
• random pair rotation every two hours at most;
• work is production work, i.e. pair freely commits;
• and most of all, the PS track adopts agility perfectly.

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There will still be judgment calls, even in a PS track. When the story is pulled, the coach may want limit its perfection in some way. But once under way, any “non-XP” judgment call must be validated by the coach.

Perfectly Slow Success

Before long, the team will start clamoring for the perfectly-slow track to be their only track.

In the mind of an agile noob, the strange ideas of agility seem either wasteful or impossible.

The perfectly slow track is ideal for giving people real agile experience without having to break through the fears and misunderstandings that propel the ‘day-job’.

Notice that perfectly-slow fits with sit-in-your-own-lap. We can take the regular track, do partial adoption there, and still park anything we don’t think we can handle into the perfectly slow track.

In real life, as we know, developers will learn how to work effectively using agility, and their techniques, moods, attitudes, and humor will spread out from the PS pairing station to infect the whole rest of the team.

When The PS Track Succeeds,

The Rest Is All Downhill!