Kent Beck - Lean IT Summit 2015
Available resources
🏷️ Tags: talk, 2015, leanit15, xp, agile, history
- One lesson learned is to always be informed by data
- It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, I can find ways to gather data, that will help me make decisions
- When explaining XP, he explained in three levels
- A value system of communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect
- A set of principles, like incremental improvement, principle of flow
- A set of practices that are derived from those principles
- So, when you explain all this you need to be pretty effective to get away from the "staring dog problem"
- Staring dog problem: “If you try to point something out to a dog, it will look at your finger”
- If you explain an idea in terms of concrete practices (like Test driven-development, Pair programming, Continuous integration, etc) people will fixate on the practices and stop thinking
- To break this, you have to find the way of communicating the intent behind ideas and not just people follow things, simply
- There is something he would definitely do differently. The name (XP) has been a big impediment
- It attracted the wrong kind of people in the early days; people who were looking for an escape from responsibility, instead of a path to responsibility
- Also the tone (of the agile manifesto) and the scope, has been things that he would have done differently
- Question: What are the main cultural shifts that you've experienced at Facebook?
- A poster in his office that says: "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem". That's it. That's the whole thing
- The thing is, how do you get 13k employees to take that poster seriously when they're providing an essential service for a billion and a halt people every month
- There's a culture of personal responsibility at Facebook that's just still he can't believe it
