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Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

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Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#51

Post by UK-AL »

flukus wrote: post #23
isoos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This matches my experience, although I was lucky that I stopped doing "Agile transitions" gigs early enough. My question is: how do you discuss this with a customer? At one point I had a talk with a director of a smaller bank, and he was enthusiastic to bring me on board, even wanted to pay me just to spend my workday in the office doing nothing specifically. I declined, because it was a lost cause: their team was to…

> their estimate for a very minor change added up to several months... It sounds like they had an issue with technical debt (and that had led to a lack of trust from the rest of the company) and thought they could fix it with a process, correct? I don't think you can help someone that won't recognise the root cause.

The reason for technical debt is the process. If you have a very waterfall like process like at a lot of large companies, everything has to go through change control.

Every change has to have business case, and becomes very bureaucratic. As a result no one proposes any changes to fix technical debt.

You can do it under the radar by attaching it to existing tasks, but these companies tend to be so project manager driven that any slippage in your delivery dates means you will get pressure applied to you. So you just do the bare minimum.

Result: Technical debt never gets fixed. Refactoring and trying to write good code is career limiting. Company wonders why they are so shit software, blames developers.

The elephant in the room is that companies follow the fixed scope, fixed budget model which basically fails every time.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#52

Post by afro88 »

flukus wrote: post #23
isoos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This matches my experience, although I was lucky that I stopped doing "Agile transitions" gigs early enough. My question is: how do you discuss this with a customer? At one point I had a talk with a director of a smaller bank, and he was enthusiastic to bring me on board, even wanted to pay me just to spend my workday in the office doing nothing specifically. I declined, because it was a lost cause: their team was to…

> their estimate for a very minor change added up to several months... It sounds like they had an issue with technical debt (and that had led to a lack of trust from the rest of the company) and thought they could fix it with a process, correct? I don't think you can help someone that won't recognise the root cause.

Don't be so sure. Layers of middle management, all with their own (often selfish) priorities between you and other teams working on systems you need to collaborate with will destroy any possibility of agility.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#53

Post by Nursie »

flukus wrote: post #30
Nursie wrote: post #22

To echo another comment on here - Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them. It's a small time allotment where everyone gets just a couple of minutes to sum up where they were yesterday, where they're going today and what's holding them up. I've seen them go wrong, when managers decide that they need to attend and use part of…

> It's a small time allotment where everyone gets just a couple of minutes to sum up where they were yesterday, where they're going today and what's holding them up. Don't you have a kanban board or equivalent where you can see what everyone's been up to and what their upcoming tasks are? Do you need to know what's holding them up if it's not you? For those of us complaining, it's not that we don't see the value, we…

>>Don't you have a kanban board or equivalent where you can see what everyone's been up to and what their upcoming tasks are?

Not where I am now, and in places where we have had various boards it was still useful to have the quick verbal communication - "Oh, I have a script that deals with some of that, it might be a useful guide, let's talk afterwards"

>> Do you need to know what's holding them up if it's not you?

The same thing may bite me soon so I need to know, or I may have a simple workaround and can offer to help them out.

I find the line in the article about it being unnecessary if the team is functioning and communicating well quite weird - the stand-up, in my experience, has been a part of that and has also been a way of saving other communication time.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#54

Post by douche »

9gunpi wrote: post #13

Another kind of cult is religious adherence to methodology while ruining the very value the methodology is supposed to enhance. When you think something is stupid (like adopting only standups), frequently it's because you don't understand the motivation behind it. Standups are one of the first obvious changes any team, no matter how oldschool and rigid, can adopt and see the results behind it quickly, to encourage fu…

Standups are a complete waste of time. Whoever floated that idea and made it popular should be ashamed of themselves.

I was sick of "circle time" and "show and tell" when I was in kindergarten. I don't need to deal with that as an adult when I have work to do.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#55

Post by taneq »

struppi wrote: post #4

I have been thinking about this a lot, ever since I first read this article, some years ago. Most of my freelance projects and technical coaching gigs in the last few years where at companies that were in or after their "Agile transition". And most got "Agile" horribly wrong. I think cargo cult is an issue, but the problem goes deeper. I wrote a conference talk titled "Your Company Will Never Be Agile" around that to…

> Many C-level executives want "true business agility" for their company: They want to be able to react quickly when circumstances change.

True, and this isn't a bad goal in and of itself, but what they don't realise is that these 'quick reactions' (aka fundamental low level changes in the product) may require orders of magnitude more work than said executives expect (and in fact, probably the work required is at least linear in the age of the company).

> (they do not have a war chest yet, so those that were not able to react quickly do not exist anymore)

I'd argue that having a 'war chest' is actually detrimental to agility (if you're thinking of agility as 'the ability to perform at our current level in a different field'). Small new companies can pivot extremely fast because even if it means throwing away their whole codebase, they've only lost a few months' work.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#56

Post by douche »

Swizec wrote: post #9
flukus wrote: post #3

I'd argue stand up meetings are the opposite of agile, the insistence on them is literally breaking the first rule of the agile manifesto: > Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Probably breaking the fourth too: > Responding to change over following a plan How many companies have done a retrospective on whether the daily recitation of Kanban board movements​ is providing any value?

> I'd argue stand up meetings are the opposite of agile Those 15min when the team gets together and talks about what they're doing and where they need help ... that's the most useful meeting I've ever been a part of. 80% of all other interactions could be removed with a kanban board and some patience. Like, shit man, sometimes it takes me more than 3 minutes to reply on Slack because I'm doing shit. Go do some stretc…

> Like, shit man, sometimes it takes me more than 3 minutes to reply on Slack because I'm doing shit. Go do some stretches or something ...

Amen. Especially when the only proper response is a LMGTFY.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#58

Post by dasmoth »

Nursie wrote: post #22

To echo another comment on here - Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them. It's a small time allotment where everyone gets just a couple of minutes to sum up where they were yesterday, where they're going today and what's holding them up. I've seen them go wrong, when managers decide that they need to attend and use part of…

Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them.

Two things that bother me:

1) You either have to hold them at the start of the working day (in which case they become a synchronization point and everyone has to turn up at the same time -- which will inevitable be a bad time for some people) or a bit later (in which case you end up with an odd slot at the start of the day which usually isn't long enough to start on anything substantive).

2) They mandate daily visibility, and (by design, I think) prevent people going off for a week or two and solving something substantial on their own.

There are possible solution to (1) -- e.g. asynchronous stand ups in a chat client (and it's probably not coincidental that the only times I've found these things at all helpful, they've followed this model rather than the actual stand-up-in-circle thing). But (2) is kind-of the whole premise of "agile teams", so not sure what can be done about that.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#59

Post by dasmoth »

tempodox wrote: post #57

I have yet to see an implementation of "Agile" that's not a cargo cult pretext for micromanagement.

Some advocates are pretty open about this:

   https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/ssssh....agile-is-all-about-micromanaging
Interesting question is -- why is micromanagement by "the team" more palatable to some (many?) people?

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#60

Post by tomelders »

Chris2048 wrote: post #46
jaggederest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agile can never work in an agency, where the client has control over budgets, deadlines, and features. There is simply no incentive for the client to compromise when your agency has made some pretty ridiculous promises and put themselves on the hook to deliver. There's an interesting triad that I've been talking to people about a lot recently. 1. Authority (the ability to make decisions of importance) 2. Accountabi…

I'd change the labels a little, since I think those terms are overloaded: I think 'authority' is 'agency', or 'self-determination', 'accountability' is 'direction'/'awareness'/'sensitivity'/'comprehension', 'Responsibility' is actually 'motivation': It also might matter if this is 'pride', or 'avoiding blame', and to what degree it is 'reactive' and 'proactive'. Obviously, knowing what you are responsible for, and ha…

You just invented Semantic-Agile.
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