I dig reading InfoQ, they generally have really good material from top talents in the software industry. Today I found a chuckle out of the worst and bad lists. The first is “Scalability Worst Practices” and the other is “10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP“. The first one I found interesting because of who wrote it, and understanding were he most likely found or experienced some of those bad practices. The other one is the continuous battle I fight, to prevent Scrum and XP from being screwed up.
Scrum, XP, Six Sigma, Lean, Agile, and any of that lot of practices are easily skewed and bent out of effect. If you aren’t getting good results from the leaner methods you have a two major failure points; A: People training or experience might be lacking or B: People refuse to buy in to learning and moving forward with the technological pieces.
In both cases people could equate to managers, developers, or anyone in the project. The fact is, it is often the managers that prove the failure point. If the developers even buy in a little bit they receive major improvements in productivity and the simple tenet of having fun while working. If managers still stay heavy in process and control, as often managers of the old echelon do, agile, lean, six sigma, and all the other cleaner methodologies do no good whatsoever.
Whatever the case though, pointing out the avenues of failure, the lists of the worst practices, and finding the bad lists in life help us to remove those things in the future. If we know the failure points, they are easier to avoid. Hats off to those that know history and can work to avoid the mistakes of the past!
