program selection system

Since I’m a tester, things to do with questioning appeal to me. As one of Jerry’s (Weinberg) Kids, I’m remind myself frequently that no matter how much it looks like a technology problem, it’s always a people problem.

I’ve been observing the submissions system. I’ve done a few little tiny research experiments. I’ve looked at the submissions for each stage. Almost all the stages (in English) have lists of submissions longer than a single page. Live Aid, Examples, and Questioning Agile are the notable exceptions. They’re all less than a page long. I’ve done searches on words like “people”, “individuals”, “interactions”, and “psychology”. I get very few hits. When I do searches on “tools”, “frameworks”, “process” and “processes”, I get more hits. A lot more. And that’s just the keywords; when I read the text for the submissions, talk about tools and frameworks and process overwhelmingly dominates talk about people. (Jim McCarthy’s proposal looks like a terrific exception to this pattern, and I was delighted to see it.) Talks about collaboration are usually about… collaboration tools.

For a long time, I’ve been observing a similar trend on the Agile Testing mailing list. Discussions about testing in that forum seem mostly to be questions about test automation. There are discussions about processes and tools, too—but few about individuals and interactions, customers, usability, defending value, and so on.

What fascinated me about agile from the outset was the idea of individuals and interactions over processes and tools; customer collaboration over negotiated contracts; responding to change vs. following a plan; working software over comprehensive documentation. These principles struck me as highly humanist—but I observe that our fixation on processes and tools and contracts seems to be hard to drop. We say we value the things on the left, but we seem not to talk about them much.

I think the agile principles are wonderful things, but I’m gaining respect for the post-agilists. My questions include: to what extent are the agile principles really being applied? To what extent are they being explored? Are we hitting the right notes? Is the agile conversation focused enough on humanist elements? When CompuWare and Microsoft claim that they’re coming out with tools to support agility, do they recognize the humanist part, or are they just marketing again? Are we submitting agile itself to challenging questions and tests? Or are we into cargo cult mode, using some swell tools that we like and convincing ourselves that standup meetings more fun merely because they’re shorter?