Tomorrow I will be giving a talk on Scrum for namics - what it is and how it works, experiences from our first Scrum projects, and why we should be using it more. (Which explains why I have working on the slides since 6:00am this morning).

In the course of my preparations, I found a blog by Steve Yegge — Good Agile, Bad Agile — in which he talks a lot about the virtues and pit-falls of Agile Programming.

Along the way, he tells us a lot about life at Google and how they develop software (outsiders find it difficult to believe that they can produce anything). And buried deep in the middle of his story, I found this little gem:

Incidentally, Google is a polite company, so there's no yelling, nor wailing and gnashing of teeth, nor escalation and finger-pointing, nor any of the artifacts produced at companies where senior management yells a lot. Hobbes tells us that organizations reflect their leaders; we all know that. The folks up top at Google are polite, hence so is everyone else.

All in all, a very interesting read. Google strikes me as a pretty "agile" place (at least if Steve's descriptions are correct), regardless of what they call it.

Innovation needs a constructive atmosphere, and I think respect and politeness are necessary pre-conditions (not sufficient conditions, but necessary ones). Which is one reason why I teach them to my kids.

Agile is at least as much about values as about methodology. Which is why I think it will be good for our customers and will fit well with namics.