It’s been about 10 years since I got my Agile training from James Grenning and started an Agile Pilot with my team. Right from the start I was super keen and got people practicing TDD and Pair Programming even though I didn’t really know if that effort would pay off. I just knew we had lots of problems with the old way so I wanted to embrace the new.
So I’d run my own little sessions with the broader team in Sydney sharing Agile concepts and ideas. Giving us a chance to discuss things and keep learning long after James had left. But often I would present new ideas and a few people in the group would respond “oh of course, that’s just common sense”. Initially I thought it was great as they were embracing these ideas as valuable even though it was not what we were doing before. But after a while I started to get frustrated because they we’re not really listening. If some small part of a concept fit nicely with their “common sense” then they took that on and ignored the rest.
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