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Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

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Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#111

Post by wool_gather »

hinkley wrote: post #106
wool_gather wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar musings under the "Dark Scrum" heading by Ron Jeffries: > Every day, the team is supposed to get together and organize the day’s work. [... The ScrumMaster ...] knows his job. His job is to stay on top of what everyone is doing, make sure they’re doing the right things, and redirect them if they’re not. How convenient that there’s a mandatory meeting where he can do that, every single day! > In practice the D…

If I keep up my training regimen, within two years I’ll be able to leap across the conference table and backhand the guy using the word “commitment” before he gets the last syllable out. It’s important to have goals.

Unfortunately in my case that's my manager, who I like quite a bit except when we discuss Scrum.

Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#112

Post by sethammons »

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #97
sethammons wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or tasks that used to take 2 or 3 days now gets split across 2 or 3 sprints, because guy 1 can't allocate it to guy 2 until he finishes it. And it just sits around until the next sprint. This so much. Because no PMs want to adhere to "sprint forecast," but insist on "sprint commitments," you literally cannot commit to doing a unit of work that depends on someone else getting theirs done first until they are done. A…

I imagine stuff like this is why kanban was developed.

I think kanban was primarily for interrupt driven projects, but this works too for pipeline like stuff.

Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#113

Post by jboy55 »

cwyers wrote: post #92
kyllo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Story points being used for the team and to tell management how much work is being done are not mutually exclusive. That's the thing though, in reality they really are mutually exclusive. As soon as management starts using a metric to measure the team's performance, that metric stops being useful for the team to improve itself, because now there is a perverse incentive to inflate the metric to get performance rewar…

Yes. Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." As soon as management starts looking at story points, it's a scramble to get the most points possible in a sprint (or at least, to not let velocity go down).

I had a VP, new to my company, come to me and say, 'Your velocity is pathetic, at my last company my engineers were doing 14-16 points a sprint, yours are only doing 8-10'. I tried to explain how that wasn't a thing and we could just start doubling our points. He seemed to indicate that's what I should do ... I started looking.

Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#114

Post by sequoia »

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #108
sequoia wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title of the article “Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few actually do” suggests that there is something called “agile methods” that can be followed. I don’t think I understand what you mean about it being a communication protocol. In any event, it seems beyond debate that the term “agile” is extremely widely misunderstood. I’m arguing that instead of tilting at windmills trying to correct e…

There are some codified system of rules and behaviors that people have developed to help their orgs gain agility e.g. Scrum, SAFe, etc. But there are probably an infinite ways to skin that cat. Doesn’t really matter which one you use just that everyone is using the same one. Which leads me onto why it’s a communication protocol. Human systems/processes/procedures just organise the flow of information, often to help p…

So waterfall can be agile as long as everyone is on the same page about it? I'm afraid I'm lost.

Incidentally, it turns out I'm a late comer to the "stop saying agile" point–an author of the Agile Manifesto was saying that 5 years ago https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#115

Post by sequoia »

maxxxxx wrote: post #35

We should have stopped at the Agile Manifesto. Everything following it made Agile worse. In the end companies will almost always regress to a top down hierarchy. True Agile is bottom up which is against the structure of most companies.

Is the agile manifesto actionable in any clear way?

Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#116

Post by nielgaard »

soperj wrote: post #27
kleiba wrote: post #24

Does any one have good (as in: known to actually have had a positive effect in the past) insights on how to convince your manager(s) that (at least their version of) "agile" is not helping the company? My wife works in a company where the managements seems to be quite "proud" to apply "agile methods" but in my wife's opinion, it's more BS bingo than producing a measurable boost in productivity, quality, or any other…

From what I've seen is that Agile doesn't ever end up working when it's driven from Management. They only care because it's supposed to be more productive, but they don't want to actually adopt any of the measures that make it more productive.

But it is always driven from management. When was the last time a group of developers decided all by themselves that they needed a development framework to get work done?

And isn't it funny how management never uses any agile framework to do their own stuff. Could you imagine the board of directors putting Fibonacci cards on their foreheads when deciding on budgets or earnings forecasts?

Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#117

Post by nielgaard »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #72
cwyers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me clarify that -- there are people who are using Scrum to do agile. Scrum is not _against_ agile. But if you are doing two-week sprints because management is chasing the latest fad, without empowering the team, you're not agile, you're just in a Scrum cargo cult.

Exactly this, agile is all about empowering devs, trusting them and allowing them to work. Sprints are about enforcing feedback from the customer into the loop. If you have a half decent customer they should be happy with any length sprint and releases that make sense.

No, sprints are about creating artificial deadlines to stress developers to work more hours to meet so-called commitments/forecasts. It does not work of course, but that is what it is about.

Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

#118

Post by flukus »

wnevets wrote: post #60
drderidder wrote: post #19

Dave Thomas, one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto [1] wrote an article called "Time to Kill Agile" [2] a few years ago (which he subsequently re-titled "Agile is Dead"). He has some good insight on how Agile (the methodology) got to be something very different from what they intended. Originally they were trying to break away from a rigid methodology, not introduce a whole new one. Unfortunately, if you…

I've dealt with "agile experts" who appear to never have actually read the agile manifesto. For those "experts" is always about following the rules and process of their version of agile. What gets presented by these "experts" is rarely anything like the original indent if not the anthesis.

"What do you think is the most important principle in the agile manifesto?" is one of my favorite interview questions. I'm yet to interview for a position as "agile developer" and have the interviewer know what the manifesto is.
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