Agile – jak to się wszystko zaczęło?

Paweł Tomkiel
Agile Manifesto to podwaliny całego ruchu zwinnego. Dzisiaj o tym, jak to się zaczęło, rozmawiam z jednym z jego twórców – Arie van Bennekum.

W tym roku, przy okazji konferencji Agile Corporate, której byliśmy partnerem jako Deloitte, poznaliśmy tegorocznego keynote speakera, którym był Arie Van Bennekum. Arie jest człowiekiem, który 20 lat temu został zaproszony do Utah do South Lake City, aby tworzyć Agile Manifesto. Deklaracja stała się podwalinami zwinności. Stworzyli ją w 17 osób i większość tych osób nadal jest w świecie zwinności, można powiedzieć, pewnymi guru. Osobami, które dzielą się swym doświadczeniem, stworzyły swoje frameworki, stworzyły swoje modele, z których nadal korzystamy, jak np. Scrum. W tym wywiadzie pytam Ariego o to, jak to wszystko się zaczęło. Jak wyglądał wtedy Software Development, ale też rozmawiamy o tym, że Agile nie jest tylko dla Software Developmentu. Rozmawiamy też o tym w jakie pułapki wpadają liderzy na szczytach organizacji, jak wygląda cały paradygmat prowadzenia firmy i jaki ma wpływ na zwinność. Zapraszam serdecznie do wysłuchania naszej rozmowy.

Paweł Tomkiel
Hello Arie, I would like to warmly welcome you to our Deloitte podcast. Thank you for accepting the invitation.

Arie van Bennekum
Yes, completely my pleasure. You know we met a while ago in Warsaw and I'm very happy to be guest here in this podcast and thank You for the invitation.

Paweł Tomkiel
You're probably most known as one of the Agile Manifesto co-authors. However, you work as a consultant, as a coach, as a trainer of Agile methodologies and so on. You created one Agile model of software development and also, you are a book author, but maybe if you can introduce yourself to our listeners.

Arie van Bennekum
My name is Arie van Bennekum, I'm from the Netherlands. Indeed, I'm one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. As you might know the Manifesto was written by seventeen people. Sixteen people were either American or living in America and I'm the only non-American. I started my career in software development in 1987, in the Netherlands, so long time ago, right? I switched to another consultancy firm couple of years later. While I was there, I got in contact with the first very early versions of what we call Agile today. I started working on Agile project, commercial Agile projects. I was working at the time with application development. In 1997 I switched to DSDM, the Agile project management framework. But if you look at me, I have always tried to cherry pick the practices that help me most from all the methodologies that we have within the Agile and over the years I became known as one of the experts in Agile transformations.

Paweł Tomkiel
And today we will be discussing the whole Agile movement the history about how it all started but maybe if we could start with describing how you understand Agile.

Arie van Bennekum
Paweł, then I need to go back why I got into Agile right? That's really an important thing to know. It is 1994 and I'm part of a very, very traditional waterfall project. At the time at the Dutch Irish and to my horror that project, after seven months of full-time work, was just stopped. I felt very unhappy with the fact that we just wasted the couple of million Euros of public money. It's money from the people, so I made a change and that's what Agile is for me. Agile is about avoiding delay, delivering business value that you really need to the market as soon as possible, and that means with a high level of quality. My whole perception of Agile is around business value that implies by the way Paweł, that when people ask me "Oh, Is Agile outside the road of IT also possible", I will say "Of course, because I did commercial projects in the mid-90s". You have to have the people, the process and you have the legal side, and if it's a product you have the marketing side, and everything needs to work on the same product on the same backlog. And that's how I perceive Agile and that's what I stand for today, still.

Paweł Tomkiel
And that's what really resonated with me on an Agile corporate conference where I heard that you describe Agile as “avoiding delays”. You've got delays everywhere.

Ari Van Bennekum
Of course, and I like to keep things very short, to two words: avoiding delay. It's true. If you look at the waterfall [methodology] there's a lot of handovers of information. So, what happens is that throughout the business translations, the original meaning gets lost very often. There are functional gaps or even misunderstandings and to fix those it takes time. You know the joke: "After a year of waterfall working you need another year to get things right". The same thing is that at the waterfall you’re testing at the end, and at the end you always have the pressure, originally you think that you do let's say two months of testing and turns out two weeks otherwise we will be delayed and we want to be on time. If you have handover of information, you get misunderstandings, you need the work to fix it, that's a delay. Inefficiencies in the waterfall are the toll gates in the request for change, whatever they do, they are dramatic and that's where I come with avoiding delay.

Zapraszamy do wysłuchania całego odcinka.