Your First 5 Iterations, aka Mentoring Agile: The Psychology of the Beginning Agile Developer, and How to fix it

From AgileOpenNorthwest

hosted by Mark Knell

• seed questions from the host:
  • what kind of struggles have you seen?
  • what kind of help did you get in your own learning process that:
    • helped
    • you were thankful for, even if it didn't help
    • hindered
  • memorable experiments
  • turning points
  • are there profiles/ generalizations we can make about how certain personalities or traits predict ease (or struggle) when learning Agile

• concepts that beginners struggle with
  • okay to fail
  • not necessary to own a problem to the exclusion of others; collaborate
  • develop UI first (if it exists) and demo
    • "do human first"
  • don't let individuals silo themselves: be cross-functional
  • think small
  • spike
    • helps think small
    • break the mini-waterfall trap
  • pairing is not just a technical practice: pair to mentor
    • don't overpower your pair partner who's learning Agile
    • i.e., mingle dev, QA, documentation, designers

• for managers / coaches / scrummasters / team leaders
  • sometimes should be silent and let the team fail
  • beware being a team member and a functional manager
    • can be done, but is complicated
    • severely reduces the productivity as a dev; don't take critical path tasks
• typical experiences across most teams
  • 3-4 iterations to feel at all familiar with Agile
  • 6+ months to feel fluent

• psychological generalizations
  • on an axis from "open" to "closed", the open are more comfortable with Agile early
    • Meyers-Briggs "TJ" type (Thinking Judging) likely to be "closed"
  • servant master, from "First Break All the Rules"
  • HR opposes Agile
  • a good dev candidate likes to learn
    • a decent proxy for this is a track record of learning programming languages