I recently gave this tech talk, basically "meat & potatoes" agile, for the team I'd just started working with. There was a bit of extra emphasis on continuous integration, as at the time I was persuading on of the projects to set up a build box to generate their deliverables (as opposed to crafting on somone's desktop).
During talks, I sometimes worry about going of on tangents and diluting the message. So this time experimented with baking two tangents into the talk itself. And it kind of worked!
The two tangents were:
- IT projects are (relative to other projects) often very expensive, and IT people well compensated (relative to other people, who do _real_ work, like teachers, journalists, firefighters, etc.). We need to respect this. One way to respect this is to work hard to deliver actual value to the customer as quickly as possible. This is a lot of what agile is about.
- I make a mild joke, contrasting the points of view where new stuff is considered hip & innovative, and old stuff antiquated and out-moded, and the point of view where new stuff is crazy and untested, and old stuff is classic and reliable. I try to use the joke to suggest that keep perspective, avoiding the hype cycle, as well as excessive caution, to choose your practices with pragmatism in mind. With agile crossing its first decade, there's no shortage of dogmatism, so this is important as well.
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