Many companies are throwing around the term agile when defining who they are and what they can offer but, as the Agile In Action blog points out, many may not be practicing what they preach.

In this post I have collected some of the telltale signs for use when determining if a company is truly agile:

“Notice the characteristics of communications with the company. One of the things I notice are the amount of red-tape involved in setting up any meetings. The more paperwork the worse it is likely to be. Long company email signatures can be the first clue.

Companies with dress down Friday who display a large cardboard cut-out of what garments constitute casual wear want drones and probably don’t encourage new ideas. Motivational posters decking the walls could be a hint that the management team is clueless.

Companies with very swish offices tend not to understand the need for developer messy thinking tools such as whiteboards. Conversly, companies whose offices look in a poor state of repair are probably also neglecting their computing infrastructure so developers will have a hard time setting up development environments, etc.

A clue that teams may be open to new ideas can be books (fiction or technical) and newspapers around. Personalised team environments can hint that the team are trusted and allowed to make changes in their space. Seeing developers talking to each other around a whiteboard or screen rather than with headphones on can also hint that they are open to reviewing ideas with their peers.”

[Rachel Davies]

“It‘s difficult to characterize an entire organisation as ‘Agile’ without working with them for a while either as a partner or as a member of staff - you need to assemble some tacit knowledge about that companies’ culture and decision making process.

It‘s much easier to analyze a specific product development team as you can look at their environment, team identity, output etc. There are a couple of properties one can extrapolate from such a team to it‘s surrounding company - is the team empowered to perform its function? is there respect between the team and the company? does the team have a clear project charter and product owner? You can get a pretty good feel for what the company is like from these kind of indicators.

It‘s also good to look at the relationship the company has with its partners and suppliers - do they enter into mutual benefit partnerships and work proactively with suppliers to improve both companies’ positions? Essentially you’re trying to determine how much trust exists in these relationships - it‘s not the only indicator but it is a useful one - it allures to the underlying culture of an organisation.

Structurally I would expect an Agile organisation to be ‘wide and not deep’; management hierarchy and bureaucracy is kept to a minimum with workers being aligned along product streams rather than into functional hierarchies such as ‘technology’ and ‘hr’.”

[Gus from JavaShed]

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As you hopefully know if you’re reading this, we’ve just embarked on the joy that is self-employment and one of the things we needed to take care of was email for refactr.com. We decided to go with GMail because, well, it rocks. It’s the best web based email around. But here’s where the data thievery comes in, I had an existing GMail account that I’ve been using for my personal email for some time. I’ve got a bunch of emails stored up in this account and I don’t want to lose them, but keeping up with one email account is hard enough, so trying to manage two has become downright nightmarish. Now I’d like to just export all my mail from my older account and import it into my fancy new Google managed refactr.com account, but alas Google has stolen my data. They’ll happily allow me to configure POP in my older gmail.com account, but for some reason in the managed account, I don’t have the option of downloading messages via POP so I cannot get at my mail. It annoys me that they won’t give me easy access to my data. I shouldn’t even have to bother with POP either, I should be able to export the mail as XML or any other number of formats so that I can import it anywhere.

At Refactr, we develop the software, but believe that your data is yours and you should always have easy access to what belongs to you.

I was reading Thomas Nilsson’s site (nice site) on Responsive Development (nice term) when I came across a quote in Thomas’ post titled What is “Agile” all about? Really? from agile guru and manifeto signatory Ron Jeffries. Jeffries offers some cautionary words about the word “intuition” and, more specifically, applying it to agile development. (at the Agile Software Development Forums)

However, I’d want to be careful with the term “intuition”. It’s a weak, and perhaps dismissive term when we use it to describe the combined experience of a group of people, brought to bear on some problem, when they are freed from their cubes and are enabled to work together.

What he is saying is the use of the term “intuition” should be limited but not intuition itself as intuition has an important place in software development and always has. Some processes seem determined to eliminate the “messy” and “non-scientific” by increasing the granularity or specificity of project requirements. I believe intuition is more than just a guess and should be given respect in the decision making process. Intuition brings to bear all of a team’s experiences and is applied in a rapid manner. Malolm Gladwell agrees, though he has chosen not to use the word in his wonderful, best-selling book Blink.

You could also say that it’s a book about intuition, except that I don’t like that word. In fact it never appears in “Blink.” Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings–thoughts and impressions that don’t seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It’s thinking–its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with “thinking.”

So to answer the question posed in the title of this post, yes, intuition does play a part of software development, an important part.

Part of the reason it has been a bit quiet around here is that we are busy taking the advice of Guy Kawasaki and others and have started a company.* Refactr is just a weblog no more. Now we are poised to take our message and skills to the masses (starting with the Twin Cities), develop powerful new software with people, and change the way people who do what we do for a living are perceived.

The truly exciting thing for us is that we get to utilize much of the process and methodology we bring to rapid software development and apply it to starting and running Refactr. Guy (if I may call him that) has outlined many ways of starting a company in an agile way.

Take a look at the Great ideas for starting things chapter from the Art of the Start (PDF). It is great stuff - making meaning, making mantra, and especially, the advice you hear from most entrepreneurs, “just start”.

There has been a lot to do to get ready for this point: There’s incorporation, drafting operating documents, filing federal tax documents, opening bank accounts, setting up payroll services and accounting systems, purchasing equipment (15.4″ MacBook Pros woohoo), and lining up projects - but we don’t let that stuff bog us down. We are outsourcing anything that is not in our core set of competencies, we are going to stay small, and we are going to form lasting relationships with everyone with whom we work. Oh yeah, and we’ll probably get a trio of those sexy Apple iPhone’s when they come out as well.

So that’s it, Refactr is open for business. We hope to find some people out there who are as excited about software as we are, but have, perhaps, had less than ideal experiences with software development or software developers. We’ll change their minds.

* OK, so Guy didn’t give us this personal advice but his great books and blog pretty much pushed us off the cliff on which we were standing.