The Latest Lecture

Today I did my third iteration of the "Introduction to Agile" university lecture for second year Computer Science students. The class size was around 30 this morning (out of a possible 38), which was bigger than it's been in the past. I'd love to chalk that growth up to the AgileMan reputation spreading across campus and bringing them in from far and wide, but I think it's actually just a larger enrollment this time around.

Since my material tends to be the same each semester, what distinguishes the different sessions are the questions posed by each group. Today, one student asked whether Agile only worked for smaller companies, as it seemed to him that it wouldn't scale well. I explained that it had been fairly common for people to assume Agile wouldn't work in larger companies, but that books had then started to appear that provided insight and guidance on how to scale the practices without losing the principles. Because time was limited, I didn't go into any of the examples, such as the Scrum of Scrums (or even Scrum of Scrum of Scrums) concept to facilitate communication between teams, or Communities of Practice to share learning and discoveries. But I thought it was a good question and showed that the young man asking it had been thinking about what he'd been hearing.

Another question was, "With Agile, do you see more instances of burn out?" As soon as this was raised, I realized that nowhere in my slides do I mention the concept of "sustainable pace." I'll have to correct that for future lectures, but in the meantime I explained what's meant by that term. Then I described how you have to reinforce that principle, in both words and actions, and that failure to do so can quickly lead you down the path to an endless series of death marches.

I was also asked what tools are available to use if you decide to go Agile (I rattled off a few, and mentioned that since Nature abhors a vacuum, there were new ones showing up on the market all the time) and what sort of projects would be better suited for Waterfall (a question I've gotten before, and to which I always offer up "heavily-contractual, government and/or highly-specified work where the customer doesn't typically change their mind midstream").

As happened with the third year, 3-hour lecture last November, this one ran out of time before we'd exhausted all of the questions. That's always a much better feeling than what's occurred with previous incarnations of this second year course: few or no questions and a palpable sense of relief from the attendees that it's over! I'm not sure what to attribute the difference to this time around, but it just seemed to flow better all around.