Читать книгу Agile 2 - Adrian Lander - Страница 24

The team, the team, the team!

Agilists are obsessed with the team. The word team comes up in almost every sentence. What about the team members? People are individuals. Yes, the team matters, but so do individuals, and the importance of the individual seems to have been lost in the Agile community.

We find this ironic because the first value of the four values of the Agile Manifesto begins with “Individuals.” It does not begin with “Teams.”

Yet today, one never hears about the individual in Agile circles; it is always “the team.” This is also confounding because today's products usually cannot be built by a team; they require many teams. So really, people should talk about “the teams,” but they rarely do; it is always the team, singular, as if each team exists unto only itself.

There is a maxim in the Agile community: “autonomous self-organizing teams.” However, as we will see later in this book, there is rarely such a thing; more common is somewhat autonomous, somewhat self-organizing teams. So teams do not usually operate independently—independence is actually a worthy goal, but it is rarely achieved—and so a focus entirely on the team, singular, is not realistic.

The worse problem, though, is the loss of acknowledgment of individuality. The culture of the Agile community is so biased toward the team that being different from the team is seen as being a misfit. We have read blog posts in which experienced Agile coaches say that if someone works differently than others on the team, then the team can do without them.

The team ethos is so extreme that it is sometimes compared to a communistic view; the individual is entirely subordinated. Agile coaches discourage any kind of individual recognition; only a team should be recognized for its success. Different levels of career experience are generally not seen as significant, despite that experience does make a world of difference, which we will discuss later. The egalitarian view that anyone can work on anything permeates Agile culture, yet the reality is usually very different.

People are individuals, they have careers, and they have financial pressures and personal needs. They want to advance in their careers, so the idea that everyone is equal translates into no one can advance: if you are on a team, you will always be on a team, and you will never progress in your career. Your income will never increase, because the value of your experience will not be acknowledged. When you become expert in working on certain things, the value of that will not be recognized because, according to Agile theory, anyone can work on anything.

Fortunately, real companies do not usually operate this way. Most real companies have pay grades and career levels. But the Agile community is a parallel universe. Levels and individual differences do not fit the Agile narrative, so there is no framework for discussing it in an Agile context.

Teams matter. Teams are powerful. Teams are a valid construct for developing software. Extremes are what are bad. The extreme idea that only a team matters is not realistic and is unfair. The extreme idea that no one can advance is unfair. The extreme idea that anyone can work on anything has the noble goal of empowerment and opportunity for all, but by itself it is extreme and must be balanced with the reality that there are experts too—more on that later.