Antipattern: Lack of effective acceptance testing
Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on.
Poor solution:
Acceptance testing is either not done or done at the end
Forces:
Excessive belief in unit testing
No testers involved
Insufficient awareness of how to “agilize”… more »
Antipattern: Too nice a guy in charge of planning
Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on.
Poor solution:
Unable to take responsibility
Cannot say no to developers/stakeholders
Forces:
Authority problems
Inappropriate personality in key role
Unclear roles/decision… more »
Antipattern: Manager is Customer/Owner
Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on.
Poor solution:
Manager prioritizes stories, tells how to do them, developers don’t have a say (because of manager’s authority)
Forces:
Customer absent
Managers want to stay in… more »
Antipattern: Programmer Marriage (when 2 become 1)
Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on.
Poor solution:
Not switching pairs
Forces:
High productivity of pair
Pair is happy
“never change a winning team”
Inability to pair with others
Consequences:
Pair does not… more »
Antipattern: Team does not refactor enough
Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on.
Poor solution:
Individuals volunteer to refactor for the team
Forces:
Trying to take responsibility on behalf of the team
Some people do not refactor enough
Some people are af… more »
Antipattern: Zero Velocity Iteration
Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on.
Poor Solution:
Concurrent work on to many stories
None of the stories are done at the end of the iteration.
All stories are in progress.
Forces:
Desire to go as fast as possib… more »
XP2006: Antipattern Workshop Results
Here is the description of the workshop I ran at XP2006:
Agile methodologies are just as prone to mistakes, deviations and subversion as any other methodology. This workshop is intended to discover and share agile process anti-patterns then discuss a… more »
Agile Process Smells: Solution Stories
One of the things that often happens when the product
owner is technically savvy is that they start writing solution stories. That
is they specify how something should be done technically rather than
what should be done.
For example here is a sto… more »
Process Smells: Waiting on Specialists
A common smell that is often detected in teams trying to become more agile is
more and more stories/backlog items incomplete at the end of the iteration.
There are a couple of different reasons this might happen, but the one I'm
interested in today… more »
Process Smells: Introduction
I've been quiet recently, but busy. Last spring I moved from the consulting world back into "regular" employment where I manage a couple of product teams and internally consult on iterative software development and agile approaches. Since starting here I… more »



