There was an 1-hour agile presentation I attended some time ago. I asked one of the other attendees for comments. She said: ‘the whole presentation was saying “communication is good“. Do we really need a hour to elaborate it?’. I don’t know answer but I like her punchline: ‘agile is about communication’.
So what do we do to facilitate ‘communication’? Well… we set up meetings. Meetings. Some more meetings. And more. Now we feel more agile.
Adding meetings to the process does not make the team agile. Remember the manifesto? Individuals & interactions over processes & tools.
Meetings don’t add value. Meetings are useful, sometimes extremaly necessary. Nevertheless they don’t add value. They are your coordination cost. What adds value, then? Coding a feature adds value… so long you code the right thing. Information discovery (aka testing) adds value. Meetings not.
at my last gig we gave up having meetings and replaced them with “working sessions”. Basically, they were the same as meetings but with a defined work output. And a decision is not an output, but a document might be. So people showed up with their laptops and paired on fixing the beauracracy problems rather than sit and talk. It was a good improvement.
Cool idea. Will try this out =)