Toronto
Ahmad is an advocate of all things open source and a developer tooling enthusiast. Currently leading the talented engineering team at Mashape in building world-class API tools and Marketplace. In his spare time, Ahmad blogs on Technology & Leadership, mentors early stage startups, and builds open source projects used by thousands of developers world wide.
Authored Comments
You're confusing Scrum with Agile.
Agile is a Methodology and comes with a Manifesto + Principles.
Scrum is a process, focused on roles, tasks and steps to deliver work.
"The other problem is that you empower people by trusting them, and not by bullying them by standing a circle like bullies in a playground."
precisely, business owners (bad ones) seem to only want to work in an assembly line, clear start, clear end, clear steps along the way. everything predictable. which is not necessarily a bad thing of itself, but the reality of software is that it's a creative profession, the more boundaries you put around it, the less quality you get.
"If you ask a customer they will always opt for the cheapest (no insurance) option, however when everything goes wrong, they want all the documentation and five-start support, so lettiing them choose is a huge risk."
Yup that's how it usually ends up anyway in Scrum, delivering sub-quality products for the sake of cost and time ...
I don't get why our industry treats customers as though they are stupid, sure some of them only care about the schedule and the cost, but those are bad customers and they are hurting themselves more than they are hurting your ability to deliver quality work, if you can't educate them and show them a better way, then fire them!!