Johanna Rothman on Agile techniques

Johanna is one of those people who, if I'd
never met her, I would hold her in awe. She has great insights, really gets managing
product development, and is an all-round good person, too.  Plus, she works amazingly
hard.  Today she was talking about a
conversation she had about the project manager's role in Agile development:

Conference attendee: "Agile processes are a license to hack!!!!!!!"

JR: "No. Every agile team I've seen is highly disciplined. No hacking there. I'm
sure there are people who say they're performing agile development, and they're just
hacking, but truly agile teams are highly disciplined."

Conference attendee: "Oh yeah? Well how come the project manager doesn't control
the team's work?"

Aha! Because the team drives the project instead of the project manager having
the illusion of driving the project, this person was confused. To make things worse,
this person thought it was the testers' job to point out how wrong the developers
were, not to provide information about the product under test.

Johanna makes me think, and laugh, and has been a facilitator in my personal growth. 
She's given me many Aha! moments.

I also enjoyed David Smith's comment
to Johanna's post.  It's an interesting thought ;-)