At our last retrospective meeting, one of my developers hinted he wasn’t liking the routine. He said he felt like Bill Murray’s character in Ground Hog Day, where every morning he woke up and it was the same thing over and over again.
While this seems like a bit of an extreme comparison, there was an element of truth in what he said. While the framework of Agile dictates a certain amount of repetition, it also gives those involved the flexibility to work on different things each day, and decide as a team what’s most important.
The rest of the team disagreed, expressing they liked having less surprises and more structure to the working day / week. In my experience, this is the general consensus, but I’d be interested if anyone out there thinks differently.
Tags: agile, Retrospective, Team
August 27, 2008 at 2:43 pm |
It’s called the death march. In waterfall, it’s continuing to work when you know that it won’t come out positively/successfully. In agile, it’s allowing the rhythm to sound more like a drumbeat than a heartbeat. The drumbeat enslaves, a heartbeat gives life.
Sounds like some of your folks are feeling satisfaction and one person might not be. Time to reflect on that persons responsibilities and differences from the others. Make sure they are mixing it up. Either something is out of balance on the team or that individual is a “glass is half empty person”. Either way, the scrum master/team coach needs to do something about it to help before that attitude is cross-pollinated to others.