(emphasis mine)
in his book "The Software Craftsman," Sandro Mancuso wrote:
Agile coaches did practically nothing to improve the skill set of people working on operations, production services, or QA. The technical disciplines, in the vast majority of Agile transformations, were totally forgotten or dismissed. There was this very naive assumption—almost unprofessional (from some incompetent Agile coaches)—that companies had developers who were great at writing code and the only thing they really wanted was to work within the Scrum framework.
... However, the principles behind Agile were forgotten. Process became more important than technical excellence. Technical excellence, which is assumed to be in place by every process-related Agile methodology, is normally ignored by managers and ill-prepared Agile coaches.
This is so true. If weren't for my constant beating on that drum, TDD wouldn't even be part of the conversation in the Agile Transformation effort in my group at work. Everyone is so focused on the process management side of things and leave the developers to go about doing things the same old crappy way. And we didn't stop there. I have collaborated with other development managers who came from the technical side and we have established the infrastructure to support Continuous Integration,
Test Automation, and Continuous Delivery. Many engineers still don't fully comprehend what CI and CD encompasses though and they still write crappy unit tests and hence still produce crappy code. And there are yet others who still don't write unit tests at all. Sigh. One battle at a time.
I have said this to managers and developers alike: "No matter how much agile process management you wrap around our software development organization, if the developers don't step up and do their part to improve their technical practices, then you'll just be wrapping crap code in gold foil. Sooner or later, that negligence is going to come back and bite us and everyone is going to blame Agile. That's just not fair."
This is why I give my workshops on TDD to any development team that expresses interest in it. Unfortunately, some managers get wind of this and start wanting to send their whole team to this training, regardless of whether the developers themselves want to or not. This is another battle I have to fight.
Thanks for putting that in the book, Sandro.
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