Not One Of Us

"There's safety in numbers
When you learn to divide
How can we be in
If there is no outside"
- Peter Gabriel, Not One Of Us

It's becoming almost comical at work these days, as we continue our epic struggle to Go Agile, to watch all the lines of division forming and breaking up and re-forming, sometimes all in the span of a single week.. or day.. or meeting! I know a lot of it's simply the churn that's to be expected in going from one way-of-life to another (DeMarco & Lister, in PeopleWare, describe how moving from the Old Status Quo to a New Status Quo involves two intermediate steps, the first of which is essentially chaos!) but it still seems very strange to me how many people are getting caught up in it, and just how caught up they're getting.

Some examples:

- The remnants of our previously-large Quality Assurance group, after most of their number 'left' to become embedded with cross-functional Feature Teams, look to be doing their best to retain some of their historical role in terms of doing black box testing, communicating through problem tickets rather than person-to-person, and shaking their heads ruefully at whatever gets checked in, while defining themselves with the New Vocabulary title of Feature Team, so as to fit into the New World Order (I guess). This has to be a strange adventure for them, with so many of their brethren gone to the Dark Side and yet so much of what they used to see in terms of issues still front and centre (most because we haven't gotten our Agile act in gear yet, rather than being intentional sloppiness). Most troubling, to me, is the fact that there's clearly an Us and Them attitude present within this group that harkens back to our Waterfall days, despite them slapping the Feature Team label on themselves.

- The members of the Feature Teams are bonding together well, for the most part. Which is good... for the most part. Where it all falls down is with the people who seem to only be able to think in terms of "Yer either with us, or agin us!" so they now couldn't care less what happens outside their Feature Team, where once (maybe) they couldn't have cared less what happened outside their Functional Group. This is progress?

- With so many erased old lines and pencilled-in new lines, certain folks seem to spend most of their free time standing on guard for slights, or omissions, that are clearly a threat to their very existence. If, for example, the idea is floated that developers should consider forming a Craftsmanship group of some sort, the immediate responses of "What about QA?" or "What if one Feature Team dominates?" pop up, because God forbid anyone be left out, or given special treatment. I guess this is perfectly in keeping with how society operates right now, but it's disappointing to see it in action among a group of otherwise-intelligent high tech specialists. For me, if I hear about a meeting that I wasn't invited to (but maybe should have been in), my only concern is whether a decision was made that adversely affects me in the short term. Anything else, I figure, will come out in the wash over time, since there's almost always time to correct missteps before they lead you off the edge of cliff. But apparently that's not a commonly-held stance in such matters. "What of me?" they all cry.

- And I've lost count of how many times I've gotten into conversations with someone who's really just trying to figure out where they fit in the new Agile world, only to discover as we talk that they actually have no idea what that new world currently looks like! It's like: OK, so I get that we've changed from playing baseball, where I knew the rules pretty well, to playing cricket now.. and I'm fine with that. Just tell me where to stand and what to hold. No, no, I don't really know the rules yet, but that shouldn't get in my way, right? Just tell me where to stand and what to hold. No wonder they're struggling so much against the structure around them right now.. most of the time, they can't even see it! Wouldn't having a better understanding of the system you find yourself in be a better approach to working well within it than simply spending all your energy trying to make sure your position is secure?

As might be obvious from the preceding, today was a bit higher than usual on the ARGGGHHH! scale for the company's efforts in Going Agile.