Mood Boards

There's something oddly comforting about cleaning up a Jira agile board to reflect a team's current workflow.  I've never been a huge fan of industrial complex Agile (with a capital 'A') and its rigid adherence to a process and several required meetings that runs completely counter to the actual agile manifesto.

The corporate Agile process was created for 2 distinct reasons - to completely control the workflow of the software engineering process, even if it sacrifices creativity as a result, and to allow people to say "don't blame me, I followed the process," when a dogmatic approach to planning inevitably fails.

But, the agile board can be a thing of qualified beauty, even if you're not using a whiteboard, painters' tape, and index cards to track your livelihood.  It's like creating a chore list, and who doesn't love that (cleaned the kitchen sink? check)?  

Can it still be used for micromanagement?  Sure, but only among Agile adherents and managers.  For the rest of us, it's a flowering image of orderly beauty emerging out of the chaos that is a multitude of Slack-defined requirements (sometimes in foreign languages).

Until next time, my human and robot friends.