Tag Archives: Dave Laribee

Local Optima

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Not to get super preachy on you all, but sometimes I think we’re full bore on the wrong mission.” — ‘Agile Shop’ by Dave Laribee

As people, we embrace change we can ourselves effect. Our conversations about value turn to story writing. Our conversations about competitiveness turn to scale.

But we risk engaging the surface of things and not the things themselves. Means to what end?

As brother bee preaches, I stand before you penitent of the sin of local optimization.

In my last job, I led a development team. We were an agile team in a non-agile company. We were engaged in the effort of years, championing organizational change bottom up.

In spite of everything we’d built — an excellent agile team, a direct relationship with our CEO, visible release backlogs and delivery — the business remained opaque. It was unable to rally to us and unwilling to provide the transparency and focus we needed to effectively rally to it.

As a result, our timeline didn’t match the life-cycle of the business. When it was acquired, our efforts were shelved and we all moved on.

An agile team in a non-agile organization is not agile enough.

Alt.Net Conference

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I had the privilege of attending the Alt.Net conference last weekend in Austin.

What I experienced was a happy collision of contrasts: mastery and inexperience, idealism and pragmatism, hope and frustration.

During the conference, the cause lacked coherent expression — though JP Boodhoo, who has a touch of the poet about him and can evoke the beating heart of it. Dave Laribee and others are very articulate in their blogs.

Still you can infer a group’s intent from its actions and over two days here’s what I connected with:

  • Fellowship: Alt.Net is a loose affiliation of master developers who attract others (like me) who wish to learn.
  • Shared Values: These developers aspire to excellence and independent judgement. They embrace passion, courage and honest reflection (articulated by JP). They seek to apply the handiest tool to any given situation and deliver value to their customer.
  • Common Cause: These developers want to bring innovative tools, concepts and practices to the .Net platform whether they arrise from within Microsoft, an open and independent developer community, or other platforms. They are calling on Microsoft’s to introduce these innovations to the larger .Net developer community — or at minimum — to not hinder their use by those who wish to adopt them.