The Agile community has a great tradition of making fun of itself and April Fools Day 2012 was no exception. Here is a wrap up of some of the best gags from this year that you may have missed.
For the second year running, David Hussman treated the community to his IT version of The Onion, aptly called The Shallot. Some of the articles from this years edition include "Microsoft Announces Newbie on Nails", "Pragmatic Bookshelf Releases: Programming Using Copy-n-Paste from Stackoverflow" and "Team Succeeds by Increasing Bug Quality". In the article "Kanban Board Falls: 3 injured in Daily Standup", Kanban is explained to the reader:
Kanban is an industrial production control system and Kanban boards hold physical cards that indicate the flow of goods or materials through manufacturing. When asked why a 21 century software team would utilize a 1950s factory tool that peaked in popularity in the 1970s-80s manufacturing industries, our reporter was met with blank looks and some puzzling utterances of “it’s more Agile” and “Scrum did not work for us!”
Over at Agile Scout, Peter Saddington announced the new premier certification from the University of Agile – Certified Agile Blogger. Those who they are suggesting should pursue this certification are:
Practitioners who have a brain (1) and write about Agile practices (2), or whose organizations are in need of the best certified candidates out there (3), are good candidates for the University of Agile Agile Blogger Certification. By earning the Agile Blogger Certification, practitioners can:
- Demonstrate to employers their level of professionalism in talking about Agile is solid.
- Show they have the capacity to lead advanced Agile project teams by holding a certification that is more credible than any other existing certification ever conceived by man.
This new certification prompted Cathy Carleton on her Marketing Meets IT blog to ponder other new certifications including the Certified Waterfall Counselor and the Certified Agile Sherpa:
You will be able to explain to the Marketing team why “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.” carries as much fine print as “Facebook values your privacy”. And why code complete isn’t as flexible as their expense account.
The team at TargetProcess on their Edge of Chaos blog gave a rare behind the scenes look at the way they work. They shared their unique approach to work prioritisation and estimation, assignments, regression tests, the workplace, education and the daily standup:
We run daily meetings at 11:00 am. Usually it takes no more than 15*pi minutes for 15 people. We found out that for most people 3.14 minutes is the preferable timeframe to share plans for today... People with the lowest individual velocity are assigned to the most complex bugs. We’ve found out that this practice increases development speed. Obviously, no one wants to fix complex bugs, so they work harder to avoid that.
Tiny Giant Books shared the revelation that the next big practice will be Agile Karoke:
The idea is to have the team sing to each other instead of talking... Singing is much more expressive. The teams enjoy it more and customers get something they can tap their foot to while watching story demonstrations. Nothing like a bunch of rockin’ chickens.
The team at Atlassian released their new defect tracking tool called IRKD, which they explain is the first consumer service for tracking everything that’s wrong with everything:
You use JIRA to track defects in your software. Now use IRKD to track defects in your everyday life. IRKD is a smartphone app that lets you "tag" anything that riles you up...
Meanwhile, the Bitbucket team introduced a new take on pair programming for distributed version control called spooning:
Forking in DVCS is a lonely pursuit, and it’s become so second nature it feels a little boring. So we’re cranking it up a notch with Spooning. Spooning is a pair programming concept, modernized for the world of distributed version control.
It just goes to show that the Agile community doesn't always take itself too seriously. Did you come across any other agile-related April Fools Day posts this year that are worth adding to this list?