Read me first!
#No
What’s wrong with Agile and how to fix it.
#No is a book about agility written in an agile way. I’ll write chapters, you’ll (I hope) read them and give me feedback. I’ll then adjust, guided by the feedback. A few of us will have “face-to-face” (or, at least, zoom) discussions to dig deeper. I expect that topics will be added, removed, changed during that process. (I intend to have a follow-on to this book called #Yes, which talks about how to do it right, but let’s start where there’s the most pain. Who knows, maybe some of that material will find its way into this book, too.)
Unlike most books on Agile, this one will be a systematic discussion of “common wisdom” that isn’t all that wise, of the of-course-we-must-do things that you probably shouldn’t do at all. A litany of the bad is not useful, of course—we need actionable suggestions for improvement—so the main emphasis of the book will be on now to change that “bad” into “good.”
I won’t be writing in strict sequence—one of the points of an incremental approach is to figure out what the best sequence is. Some of the initial chapters will be edited and expanded posts from holub.com/blog. I’ll put an outline/tentative-table-of-contents into another post, however, so you can get overview of the topics I have in mind.
I’m doing this on SubStack as something of an experiment. I may leave the platform if it’s not working out (don’t worry, your subscription will move with me if I do that), and I’ll be experimenting with the platform as I go. What I really want is to integrate SubStack-like capability into my blog, but I’d rather spend time writing the book than working on that, so here we are 😄.
The book
When the dust settles, I’ll move the “finished” book over to LeanPub.com (I say “finished” in quotes because, like any Agile project, it will never be finished. I plan to modify it periodically as I learn, and LeanPub is a good platform for working that way). I may put it on Amazon, too, but that’s not quite so flexible a platform. Subscribers will, of course, get a copy of the LeanPub ebook when I get to that point (it’s reader-format neutral, so you should be able to upload to your reader of choice).
What to expect as a paid subscriber
I’ve never done this sort of paid-subscription thing before, so expect things to change as we all learn (and please feel free to discuss), and expect occasional experiments.
I’m expecting that you’ll be coming here wanting to improve your agility. A lot of the things I’ll be saying are controversial in some circles, and what I’m hoping for is reasoned discussion and lots of questions. We’re all here to learn, or at least I am, but the best books of this sort answer questions, and I’m hoping that you’ll ask things that didn’t occur to me so that I can get the answers into the book. I’ll create a thread expressly for general questions, as compared to questions/comments about a specific chapter or section.
I expect to write about 1000 words/week on average (sometimes more, sometimes less). That will get us to a finished book in a year or so—maybe less if I write more. The point of subscribing is that you don’t want to way for a year to get the material. You also get your questions answered in the book, and to introduce topics that I hadn’t thought about. I’m hoping that a community will form around the book as well.
The holub.com email list
Substack is, itself, a mailing list, but if you subscribe, you’ll be automatically invited (it’s an invitation, not an opt-out) to my normal mailing list over at holub.com/subscribe. That means that you get occasional notices directly from me about public classes. Every such mailing has an unsubscribe, link, ofc. (I’d as soon not pay MailChimp for subscribers who don’t want to get the mailings 😄).