Elisabeth Hendrickson has this ‘thought for the day’ to day on twitter: if you’re doing Agile and asking how to track tasks assigned to individuals in a sprint, your doing it wrong..

This started the wheels turning. Specifically around the word ‘assigned’. There is a really two type of task assignment: explicit and implicit.

An explicit assignment is one where a task has a specific name written on it; ‘check new login for for xss – Adam’ for instance. But if Adam is the xss detection guru, there can be an implicit assignment (and agreement) among the team that he is doing that task.

I’ve seen implicit assignment a tonne of times. I’ve done it myself when presented with a list of tasks to distribute (to the wagile team I was leading at the time).

Implicit assignment originates I think when people get comfortable in their roles and do not stretch beyond their increasing specialty. It might also be a result of ‘that is always what I have done’ syndrome as well which is related to comfort but subtly different.

I realized the reason this idea struck a chord was that I listed to a sports podcast on the way into work where they were talking about fighting in hockey. This is a big issue as someone died as a result of a fight on the ice (who happened to play on my town’s team but has become a regional / national issue). On Wednesday night there was a game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and New York Rangers. It should have been a good game but when the first team (I don’t remember which) submitted their starting lineup they put their ‘enforcer’ at center for the face-off. Well, enforcers go out for one reason. To fight. They are not told ‘go take so-and-so out’ explicitly, but they know their role. Of course when the other team saw this they didn’t put their star center out, put their enforcer out too. Again, no one said there was going to be a fight, but everyone knew their was going to be one. And their was.

Another sports example which coincidently involves ‘enforcement’ but this time lacrosse. Last year we were at a Rock game and a Sting player decided to get more than a little rough / dirty with his stick against Rock captain Jim Veltman. Veltman may not be the Gretzkey of lacrosse, but he is absolutely going into the hall of fame and was without a doubt the star of the team. He is literally in the ‘thou shalt not touch’ category. So he goes off the floor at the end of his shift and out goes the next one with a slight tweak. There is someone who we haven’t seem much of yet and rather than run down into the play he ran at the player who was roughing up Veltman and we had a ‘tussle’. Again, did the coach say ‘go get him for Jim!’? I would wager not, but when they were told to go on the floor after that they knew their role. We in the stands also did.

Explicit vs. Implicit. It is still assignment regardless of the method.

Back to testing though, assignment by either method violates the spirit of shared code ownership and lack of specialization silos. If assignment is happening, you are certainly doing Agile wrong. And in the situation where there is specialized knowledge as the basis of assignment, Elisabeth suggests that others should be pairing with the ‘expert’ to improve their knowledge. I agree.