41–50 of 93 posts
Sometimes this will look like one of the named methodologies under the "agile" umbrella, sometimes it won't.
Sometimes you get a team that will do fairly well regardless of which methodology they get stuck with. Sometimes you get one that will do badly regardless of methodology.
But I agree with your general sentiment - As currently practiced, Agile generally involves a lot of ceremony before actually building, with many rounds of collaborative planning and risk management on every decision. It's morphed into something completely different than the original definition...
We have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.(We were too busy for an agile class or project, only got waterfall, since it is simpler.)
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
I’ve worked in large companies where none of this is true, but they called it agile.
It’s not.
How I prefer to run it:
- 1h per week alternating between estimating and planning
- (optional) 1h per sprint for backlog refinement
I like to keep two sprints worth of work in the backlog. More than that, the spec will change too much, and you will re-estimate. When a project has just started, or the requirements have become understood differently, to get four weeks of backlog work may require additional refinement. I typically do the bulk of this refinement myself (as a tech lead), and I try to avoid asking the team to have any extra meetings beyond what I mentioned above.
It can be good to have retros sometimes, but it's better to have a team that feels safe to share and discuss issues constructively without a mediator.
I'd also like to advocate for 1:1s. We are all humans and social organisms. Ideally, these 1:1s are 80% unrelated to a work task.
> My current company spends 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings This doesn't have anything to do with agile. You can run "agile" with as little as an hour of meetings a week if you want. Planning, retro, refinement in one weekly, async standup in Slack. You can bring standups in person, have them daily or less frequently, adjust the frequency, change your sprints from 1 to 2 weeks. Even the heaviest weight version…
> Even the heaviest weight version of this I can imagine (daily 30 min standups, 1 hour planning, 30 min retro, weekly sprints) adds up to 4 hours total for the week. So what you're describing is 80% something beyond that. Pivotal Labs, well known for "doing Agile right," spends the entire Friday doing no work every week.
And the big names in tech also purport to use agile and spend maybe an hour every Friday or Monday doing "agile" type meetings. Which are we talking about here?
If it helps, add to my above post that I'm using "agile" to mean the philosophy of defined sprints with stand ups, planning, and retrospectives to help execute a larger, changing roadmap. There are many many other rules people can choose to add, but my experience across many companies is that this is the shared core in practicality.
When people say agile, 95%+ of the time they don't mean whatever Pivotal Labs is using for a standard. I've practiced "agile development" at F10, big tech, and under 250 person startups, and no one has ever referenced a strict spec definition like that, not even the F10 which basically said "here's some detailed guidelines some use, take what works". So what's the relevance of this strict definition?
I’m certain that I am part of that problem. My neurotype seeks, even demands novelty. My role requires creative work among a stream of incidents. The not quite platform team thing. I’m finding myself working late and at odd times to get creative work done and it’s not sustainable.
The promise of agile is to fix this. The reality is most people can’t, won’t, or simply don’t say “no, there’s no cutting in line. It goes to triage then the back of its respective line.”
I don’t think Distraction is a good thing per se, but it feels inevitable from where I sit. Agile eschews planning, or embraces not sticking with the plan as state changes. I’ve not really worked in a waterfall environment, but if it’s agile’s antonym then I’m in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even the heaviest weight version of this I can imagine (daily 30 min standups, 1 hour planning, 30 min retro, weekly sprints) adds up to 4 hours total for the week. So what you're describing is 80% something beyond that. Pivotal Labs, well known for "doing Agile right," spends the entire Friday doing no work every week.
Disclaimer: Defining and using a narrow definition agile IMO is a useless rabbit hole. And the big names in tech also purport to use agile and spend maybe an hour every Friday or Monday doing "agile" type meetings. Which are we talking about here? If it helps, add to my above post that I'm using "agile" to mean the philosophy of defined sprints with stand ups, planning, and retrospectives to help execute a larger, ch…
> My current company spends 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings This doesn't have anything to do with agile. You can run "agile" with as little as an hour of meetings a week if you want. Planning, retro, refinement in one weekly, async standup in Slack. You can bring standups in person, have them daily or less frequently, adjust the frequency, change your sprints from 1 to 2 weeks. Even the heaviest weight version…
> Even the heaviest weight version of this I can imagine (daily 30 min standups, 1 hour planning, 30 min retro, weekly sprints) adds up to 4 hours total for the week. So what you're describing is 80% something beyond that. Pivotal Labs, well known for "doing Agile right," spends the entire Friday doing no work every week.
It was way more productive than with my second team where we used one hour every two week for the retro. In big company, the time you actually spend on understanding how everything work is never really lost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even the heaviest weight version of this I can imagine (daily 30 min standups, 1 hour planning, 30 min retro, weekly sprints) adds up to 4 hours total for the week. So what you're describing is 80% something beyond that. Pivotal Labs, well known for "doing Agile right," spends the entire Friday doing no work every week.
Disclaimer: Defining and using a narrow definition agile IMO is a useless rabbit hole. And the big names in tech also purport to use agile and spend maybe an hour every Friday or Monday doing "agile" type meetings. Which are we talking about here? If it helps, add to my above post that I'm using "agile" to mean the philosophy of defined sprints with stand ups, planning, and retrospectives to help execute a larger, ch…