Tag Archives: agile humor

Agile Humor – More Agile Drinks

The Scope Creep

Gin and tonic. Wait, can you add some bitters to that? Oh, and can the tonic be in a separate glass? I’ll have it over at that table instead. And can you bring some peanuts with that? Then some buffalo wings?

Debug Sour

Whiskey and sour mix, sent back three times until the bartender gets it right.

Minimum Viable Martini

A martini glass with just enough chilled vodka for the first sip.

Cowboy Code Margarita

The best margarita you ever tasted, but the bartender can’t replicate it. Plus, the bar’s a mess.

Click here for more Agile drinks from a previous posts…

Click here for even more Agile drinks

Click here for still more Agile drinks

Agile Humor – The Cocktail Hour

Signature drinks:

The Sprint

Grey Goose and dissolved Skittles, the only mixer available from the vending machine at 2 am.

Velocity Sour

Jack Daniels, club soda and lemon juice, already 3/4 finished.

Harvey Kanbanger

Smirnoff, Galliano, and orange juice with an orange Post-it garnish.

Scrum Punch

Bacardi Silver, Hawaiian Punch and frozen lemonade concentrate, drunk standing up at 8:30 am.

Lean Martini

It’s not necessary to know the full recipe up front.

Backlog Captain and Coke

Captain Morgan. That’s all. The Coke will be added in the next sprint.

New Agile Jobs

Code-Alones – Programmers who lack the people skills to be developers.

None-Of-Your-Business Analysts – Requirements gatherers for skunkworks projects.

Projectile Managers – Representatives of death march projects who must appear before angry stakeholders in the Marketing Conference Room.

Time Bandits – Scheduler/Physicists who bend the time-space continuum at the end of a sprint.

Pester Control – Analysts who intercept and gently steer away stakeholders who try to bother the development team with scope creep requests.

Agile Humor – More Words to Live By

Buristic Review – An exercise to gain heuristic insight that will be rejected by a bureaucrat because the research didn’t come from his team.

Merital Raise – A merit-based pay increase for spending more time in the office cranking out code with your colleagues than at home with your spouse.

Rocked-It Shock – The horrifying realization after you totally rock a capabilities presentation that you now actually have to do all those things you just talked about.

Multi-BuryIt Testing – Variations that tested so poorly that you make the developer destroy all the code for it, then pull the backups and erase them too.

Prefictive Model – Advanced analytics that predict outcomes from innovative scenarios that haven’t a chance in hell of being approved.

Agile Humor – New Certifications

The brilliant Peter Saddington, a/k/a AgileScout, posted a wickedly funny April 1st announcement of a Certified Agile Blogger course. Yep, April Fool! Read it, it’s great fun.

Since I blog about Agile from the point of view of the business stakeholders, it got me thinking about other certifications we could use in the Agile community.

CERTIFIED WATERFALL COUNSELOR

This 2-day course will give you all the skills you need to wean the business off Waterfall into the new Agile reality. You’ll learn to recognize the stages of change resistance:

Denial – “We’ve never done it like this, not going to start now. Unless you’re going to make each sprint eighteen months long.”
Anger – “I wouldn’t scrum with you if you were the last PM on earth!”
Bargaining – “Okay, okay – I’ll meet with you to answer your requirements questions, just give me one more product cycle that carries a three-ring binder full of comprehensive and immovable up-front requirements.”
Depression – “You don’t really want my sign-off. Nobody values my opinion anymore, all anybody cares about is that stupid wiki now.”
Acceptance – “Right, so explain to me again how that task moves from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Done’.”

CERTIFIED AGILE SHERPA

Marketing is from Vegas, Dev is from Alderan. (Silicon Valley. I meant Silicon Valley). There’s a language barrier. The two teams dress differently, have different customs. Marketing needs an Agile Sherpa, a guide and emissary, to help them navigate this unfamiliar world.

Upon completion of the Certified Agile Sherpa course, you will be bilingual, fluent in both Geek and Hype.

You will be able to explain to the Marketing team why “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.” carries as much fine print as “Facebook values your privacy”. And why code complete isn’t as flexible as their expense account.

You will be able to explain to the Dev team that “The sole success criterion will be the number of clicks generated.” carries as much fine print as “Drink responsibly”. And why there would be another success metric besides velocity.

Are there other certifications that could be useful? Drop me a line in the comments. this could be the start of a beautiful collaboration. With a little fine print…

Agile Humor – The Definition Of Done

The CMO: When the new functionality reduces the bounce rate from 40% to 4%.

The CIO: Done? When’s the release, 11:45? 11:46.

The PR Director: 11:45? I told ClickZ and TechCrunch it went live last Tuesday.

The Product Owner: When our new video has been viewed more times than that Evolution of Dance guy.

The Product Manager: It’s not done until the ten missing original requirements make it back into the functionality.

The Developer: It’s done. Remember we dropped ten of the features from this sprint when you told me it couldn’t be coded in Flash? Now they’re enhancements scheduled for Sprint…um…Omega.

The Analytics Manager: Done? It hasn’t started. You won’t have any data until they get the WebTrends tags working in Sprint…um…Omega.

The Scrum Manager: When the last hot fix deploys. What day is it? Never mind, bring me a Red Bull.

The Social Media Manager: Until Zuckerberg changes his mind again.

The Director of Sales: We changed the website? Oh yeah, look at that.

General Counsel: It’s done. I mean really done. The animal rights people are picketing on our lawn over that edgy new “Exploding Koala” logo. Take it down.

Agile Humor – Top Ten Rejected Agile Taglines

1. Accelerate Success But Let’s Not Get Crazy About It

2. Aggression In Its Most Passive Form

3. Delivering Your Lame-Ass Ideas Faster Every Day

4. We’re Not Arrogant – We’re Winning

5. We Put The “Um” In Scrum

7. Visualize Your Stakeholder’s Blank Stare

8. Thinner. Lighter. Faster. On A Good Day, Anyway.

9. Creating Velocity Without Personal Lives

10. Transforming the World Of The Lazy Marketer

Agile Humor – Yo Momma’s So Agile…

Yo momma’s so Agile she took a two-day vacation and came back a Certified Momma.

Yo momma’s so Agile she makes you eat breakfast in fifteen minutes, standing up.

Yo momma’s so Agile she’ll only commit to PTA four weeks at a time.

Yo momma’s so Agile she packs your lunchbox with vending machine Pop Tarts and three cans of Red Bull.

Yo momma’s so Agile she calls you “my little iteration”.

Yo momma’s so Agile she’s a 27-year-old guy in a Rally Software T-shirt and Dockers.

Yo momma’s so Agile, when the laundry piles up she calls it load debt.

Yo momma’s so Agile she won’t let you play anywhere near the waterfall.

Agile Humor – Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

THE BUSINESS ANALYST

I have twelve meetings today, I don’t have time to get into the whole user story. But I can tell you it involves a rooster on a distributed team.

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

So the chicken can check in and oust the Mayor of the Other Side of the Road.

THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER

The chicken is just not going to be able to cross the road this month. Crossing requirements were due last Friday. She will have to take her place on the backlog. Maybe the chicken can cross the road in Sprint 9.

WEB ANALYTICS

We’ll need to get some tags on that chicken to be able to tell you that.

THE BUSINESS OWNER

Because I have three other business initiatives riding on the chicken being on the other side of the road that were supposed to start six weeks ago. You’re killing me.

UX

The question isn’t why the chicken crossed the road. The question is why the chicken felt she had to cross the road. If a coop’s usability issues won’t allow chickens to complete their egg-laying tasks, they’ll bail that coop and find another one that will.

THE DEVELOPER

Because the requirements said so. The trebuchet was the most efficient method. Oh, she had to get to the other side alive? Where was that in the requirements?

SCRUM MANAGER

Let’s iterate, people. Let’s get the chicken to the center line today, and we’ll talk about the rest of the way tomorrow.

More Agile Humor – Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road (2)

Agile Humor – Words To Live By

Agilewashing – A waterfall shop that throws a scrum or two onto their schedule to seem cool. The Agile equivalent of a veneer, also known as “all hat, no cattle”.

Agillectomy – Removal of a development team’s efficiency gland by the new waterfall-loving CTO.

Hubristic Evaluation – When development teams assess usability by asking themselves what they would want if they were the user.

Documutation – Transformation of development notes from multi-page to post-it size.

Lame Theory – Mathematical constructs to predict how stupid decisions multiply in a group dynamic.

Kanbanista – Someone who is aggressively, revolutionarily passionate about colored tape on whiteboards.

Scrum of the earth – An Agile team that recycles.