Real Rules vs Self Imposed Rules
Posted by andy in : Software, Teams on February 23, 2005I had an interesting conversation while running an agile training course with Alistair Cockburn. He has a common theme running through his books – that agile is cheating legally to win.
When you explain Agile to people you often get the response, “but that’s cheating!”
Our conversation with the class was about which rules are real rules (i.e. those imposed by the customer, or legal bodies) and which rules are ones the teams have imposed on themselves without realising it? When you run a retrospective on your process, you are trying to find ways of making things better (which rules you can break legally!).
When you start thinking in terms of real rules and self imposed rules it really opens up opportunities. Try it as let me know how it goes.
