Caricatures of Agile: The Goldfish

As agile developers, we sometimes like to point our fingers and snicker at some of the more problematic personalities that can sometimes haunt waterfall development shops. To some extent, we take comfort from the sense that many of these personalities are able to hide out in the nooks and crannies of the waterfall methodology, but certainly Those Types Of People would never survive in an agile shop.

Take the classic example: the Hidden Deadbeat. While many agile environments force a lot of developer interaction by putting the team in a shared project room, the waterfall world still embraces the cubicle farm. And we’ve certainly met a large number of Hidden Deadbeats: people who don’t really do or accomplish anything, but who succeed in not doing anything for long periods of time because they don’t have to interact with people very often. If nobody really knows what they do, then nobody really knows that they’re doing nothing.

But agile projects have their fair share of… interesting personalities. There are some behaviours that are downright dysfunctional. Sometimes a difficult behaviour can provide a good counterbalance to another problematic behaviour. Pairing someone who just wants to get things done with someone who likes spending a lot of time thinking about concepts and theories creates a powerful team.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

A case to watch

TORONTO - A right-wing political commentator should face trial for referring to a blogger as a Taliban supporter during a heated online exchange, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled Thursday.

The unanimous decision set aside a lower court ruling that dismissed the case against Roger Smith, an active participant in the blogosphere and regular contributor to the conservative website FreeDominion.ca.

Smith was accused of defamation by John Baglow, who operates the left-leaning Dawg's Blawg and brought his case before the Superior Court of Justice last year.

The lower court ruled that the remarks _ made during a debate about Canadian Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr were not defamatory, since they represented a statement of opinion rather than fact. Justice Peter Annis also ruled the remarks did not constitute libel, since they were exchanged in the charged online environment where hostile barbs are considered routine.

However, the appeal court decision said such a question could not be decided without the closer examination offered by a trial, since the world of online commentary is relatively uncharted by the legal community.

"The responses may have far-reaching implications. They are best crafted on the basis of a full record after a trial – at least until the law evolves and crystallizes to a certain point," the three-judge panel said in its decision. "A trial will permit these important conclusions to be formulated on the basis of a record informed by the examination and cross-examination of witnesses and quite possibly with the assistance of expert evidence."

-- "Ontario court orders blog-based libel case to trial", Winnipeg Free Press