tl;dr you still can't Taylorise clue, but that'll never stop the Mgt. trying.
Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
41–50 of 117 posts
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#42Yeah Agile is used as a way to make money now days. For what other reason there are Agile consultants, Agile agencies and Agile certification. I firmly believe that Agile is about doing what makes sense in this team right now. You let the team to decide on their process, on their way of work and get away. And for good managers this is enough - you are empowering your team to succeed. Recently I had a great success de…
What was it about your standups that were hurting your team? I'm on the fence with daily standup meetings. they definitely can help a team communicate when there are a large number of external forces at play in a larger organization and if there are no underlying asynchronous communication channels available. on the other hand, in a team that communicates regularly with historical communications available to new team…
Among the negatives of standups are:
- Rarely the right information. Every person in the team have different needs for information. It is even harder to deliver the right amount and on the right level if your team includes designers, quality engineers, project/product managers.
- Rarely at the right time. If your company culture includes flexible hours, no matter at what time you put the standup somebody will suffer. Most of the time the team members who come early suffer - they already started work, now you are forcing them to get out of context and attend a meeting.
- Sometimes standups are used as a way to force some team members to do what they have promised (the what I'll do today). But if you are using them in this way is really counterproductive - you either trust that your peers are doing their best for the team or you might consider team change (which I understand is beyond our control sometimes).
- Failure to communicate (or "the what problems I have/had" part). If your team members are mature enough and they had a problem during the course of the day, they shouldn't wait for the next day's standup to let everybody know about that. The should be proactive and seek resolution as the problem comes up.
- Finally the "what I did yesterday" part. This information is commonly used by the managers, but there are better ways to deliver it. Most of us use some way of tracking our work. We only need to flow this information to our managers. It is also a mind shift for them - instead somebody pushing this information to them, they should be proactive and seek it and pull it. If you don't know what somebody is working on, then go and ask him. You don't need to loose the time of the whole team for this.
That being said whether you will use standups or not depends largely on your team dynamics. In new teams or teams formed largely by junior developers it makes sense to have standups - its a way to force communication patterns and certainly can be used as a casual form of a team building. But in my opinion as the team matures there is less and less need for standups, so at one point it just becomes a hurdle. And the good thing about being agile (not SCRUM) is that you can evaluate your process and change it as you (and your team) see it fit.
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#43Disagree. Language is not an immutable thing and is always evolving in its use to reflect the concepts of the people using it. I think capitalizing Agile as a noun makes it a "thing" that we can refer to collectively and ultimately helps us communicate about the concepts that it entails. The unfortunate down-side is when a popular term is misused due to ignorance and misunderstanding by a large group of people - whic…
Thank you for a defence there.
I do think the word "Agile" is getting over-loaded (I recently had an talk with some folks at the GDS and it went sideways when we did not realise we meant different things). So the manifesto is useful just as a common reference point.
I am also glad someone else is saying "hey sticky notes and paper may not be so useful in a remote working world".
Admittedly I do love the methodology he espouses
What to do:
Find out where you are
Take a small step towards your goal
Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
Repeat
How to do it:
When faced with two of more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
In much nicer terms as he worked with them, that's the gist of what the article is about. Did you read it?
Yes. It doesn't deserve nicer terms. I've seen companies destroyed, careers destroyed and armies of consultants make off with people's livelihoods on a false promise. For ref, I've migrated to the side of thing where I get pulled in (Harry Tuttle style) to sort companies out after they've been pillaged by these asshats.
So of course, you'll never see the Agile/Scrum implementations that are successful.
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"getting the right people in and let them organize themselves" That's a large part of what agility was/is about. The rest also matches up pretty well.
Actually I disagree. The large part (possibly not the intent) was about building a consulting empire around something utterly vague with multiple religious opinions about the best way to perform these manifesto actions. A vehicle for rats.
The original meaning of agile, the manifesto, was doing it right. The consultants jumped on the bandwagon and called themselves agile until it stuck. But I don't think the right response is to say agile is now bad, it's to reclaim the word from those who're misusing it.
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#46Disagree. Language is not an immutable thing and is always evolving in its use to reflect the concepts of the people using it. I think capitalizing Agile as a noun makes it a "thing" that we can refer to collectively and ultimately helps us communicate about the concepts that it entails. The unfortunate down-side is when a popular term is misused due to ignorance and misunderstanding by a large group of people - whic…
Agree completely on all points. I've also seen the large disconnect between people who say they practice Agile and those who have actually spent time to learn it.
Regarding the Agile manifesto. It seems like it's a relic of the past and perhaps that's why it's not included directly in the Scrum Rulebook. I haven't gotten any practical use out of it, and it seems to only confuse people who do not take a minute to interpret the wording at more than a superficial level.
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It doesn't deserve nicer terms. I've seen companies destroyed, careers destroyed and armies of consultants make off with people's livelihoods on a false promise. For ref, I've migrated to the side of thing where I get pulled in (Harry Tuttle style) to sort companies out after they've been pillaged by these asshats.
But a good question is who and why brought those asshats?
senior management, of course
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#48I never really understood this whole rage about agile and some people preaching it like a religion. You can't fit everyone in one frame, people are different. As the matter of fact the better the engineer the more quirks he will have. Some people like to jog, some like to sprint and rest, but if they cover the same distance and reach the finish in the same time, who cares what methodology they use? Even though I prob…
Excellent running analogy, i'm going to remember that!
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#49I found that no methodology works as well as getting the right people in and let them organise themselves. If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter what methodology or process you bring in, you're screwed. On that basis, methodology isn't that relevant. I just watched a company apply SCRUM to apparently solve process problems and it just made things worse because the staff aren't disciplined or interested in w…
If Scrum is applied well, all issues with the staff and the rest of the organisation will surface as blocking issues.
That's pretty much the #1 reason I find Scrum useful. It makes shit hurt. When introduced in a disfunctional organisation, it's basically a role-playing version of root cause analysis.
Of course, when implemented internally in a disfunctional organisation by people who are part of the problem, those issues will be swept under the rug and the problem will only get worse.
If an organisation doesn't want to change (including making the hard decision of firing the incompetent and undisciplined), not methodology will help.
And neither will your manifesto.
Yes, everything depends on having the right people and having them organise themselves (which is the very foundation of Scrum and most Agile methodologies). But in order to organise yourself it's helpful to use a clearly defined method instead of re-inventing the wheel.
Teams that fail with any Agile method are likely to fail at self-organising anyway.
No methodology solves the people problem, but some methods, particularly Scrum, are very good at identifying the exact nature of the people problem.
Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
#50I found that no methodology works as well as getting the right people in and let them organise themselves. If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter what methodology or process you bring in, you're screwed. On that basis, methodology isn't that relevant. I just watched a company apply SCRUM to apparently solve process problems and it just made things worse because the staff aren't disciplined or interested in w…
The point of that article is that you need to be self reflective and open to change. I'll post it here again, without any of the other distracting things he said about verbs and so on. Just take a moment to think about what these steps actually mean: - Find out where you are - Take a small step towards your goal - Adjust your understanding based on what you learned - Repeat If you want to work as effectively as you c…
Spot on. This has been sort of an obsession of mine lately using the game of hangman and decision theory to "prove" why this works and how it applies to software development.
There are so many dogmas out there (Fail fast, MVP, Agile, Lean, etc) which all boil down to the same thing: Maximizing information gain and minimizing the cost of failure.
I'm planning on a blog post/email course/talk/something in the next few weeks but it's not quite ready yet.