Coercive Immediacy 10
I have been thinking a lot about the “short reach” idea, and tryng to reach beyond it to capture the thing that the good agile project teams have and several others are missing. At the same time, I’ve been reading up on some agile tools (including one by a guy I know) in my spare time. In addition, I am on a mailing list for multisite agile development. Finally, I have been pondering how to work this agile stuff when the developers cannot be co-located due to shortage of office space or shortage of common areas.
I realized that the whole “short reach” thing creates a kind of coercive immediacy.
The corkboard with all the story cards in their four columns has that kind of immediacy. I can’t walk past it without assessing how far we are in the current iteration. I can certainly ignore a web page, or a display in some application on my computer. I can’t walk into the common area past that board without thinking.
Likewise, I could ignore an app that holds story status and backlog, but the cork board is where I go to show that I’ve completed a task and to get the next task. If my stories were assigned to me (rather than allowing self-organization) then I could neglect the corkboard too. I would not have to look at it or think about it. I could hold “my” story card at “my” desk until I decided I was done. When we are self-organizing, we are always thinking about who could help us, when we can get done, and what is the best way to truly complete this story and move on.
A partner has coercive immediacy. When you are programming in pairs, you don’t answer the phone unless you have to. IM and mail can wait. Interruptions are less welcome. Having two people on the story pushes one to focus. Also, the pair partner is always there to catch the sloppy shortcut, the poor naming, the ill-considered algorithm.
The customer team member also participates, and both feeds and feels the coercive immediacy of the team. Rather than make a guess, the programmer feels the nearness of the customer, and it’s much easier to ask than guess.
I think that TDD shows this most of all. I can’t choose to ignore the red bar. I write a line of code or two, and now my tests pass. The immediacy would be gone with it, except that I know I have some cheesy, minimal-effort code and I can’t leave it that way. I need a better test. When a test fails in some area where I’m not working, I feel the immediacy.
With distribution, multi-site, tools, and the rest I fear that we lose the coercive immediacy of Agile development. If we don’t have a partner in our way/face, then we lose something. If the status board is a tool somewhere, even a really nice tool, but I have to remember to ask for it to see it, then it is not in my way. It doesn’t inspire me.
My thought now is that an agile management tool won’t help unless it is something we have to live with all the time, during pairing, as part of the test/code/refactor cycle. It has to be in our faces, over our heads, and not just tickling the edge of our awareness like a more polite version of “clippy”.
If the status board is a tool somewhere, even a really nice tool, but I have to remember to ask for it to see it, then it is not in my way. It doesn’t inspire me.
The immediacy would be gone with it, except that I know I have some cheesy, minimal-effort code and I can’t leave it that way. I need a better test. When a test fails in some area where I’m not working, I feel the immediacy.
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