We follow "Jira methods".
Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If your agile ceremonies end up being all about giving management control -- if your story points are used to tell management how much work is getting done, if management is using the daily standup to make sure people are on-task instead of being about commitments. If agile is just another way for management to exert control over software development, rather than being about ceding control to software developers, i…
Bad management is Nosferatu: it's a blood-sucker by design. If you take Dracula out of the Carpathian Mountains and move him to Carfax Abbey, Dracula is not going to stop being a blood-sucker, he's just going to start drinking Lucy and Mina's blood. Agile is, to my mind, more likely to get you to the right place than something like waterfall. But all the methodology in the world won't save you if management is bad. P…
I'm going to steal your quote.
Sometime I equate the near constant complaint about Agile processes with a hypothetical set of engineers complaining about a 'baseball' process. "The 'Baseball process' sucks because our psychopathic managers beat us with the bats to get us to work harder. If only we switched to the "soccer" process, things would get better because there's nothing for them to hit us with, they'll just punch and kick us. "
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
5 minutes for 7 people? Something is wrong with your math, you might get the meeting over with in 5 minutes on the best day, but it won't have been very valuable or informative. How exactly are you supposed to make three whole statements per person and also leave room for helpful reactions and questions... in an average of 14 seconds per person-statement and response? That might be how long it takes if nobody has any…
Response? The only time there is a response is if there is a blocker and even then, it is just a comment to speak after the meeting with the people affected. 14 seconds is a long time to answer them if you are prepared and don't dilly dally around. For goodness sake, the majority of time, someone is working on the same feature today as yesterday and has no blockers. It takes seconds to communicate. It isn't like ever…
I guess we're pretty lax about it and not really following the rules. Almost always people do not respect the rules of the stand-up, and it becomes the status report meeting.
If you're doing it correctly, it should definitely not run over 15 minutes. Other groups that I've observed are having 30-minute standup meetings with 15 or 20 people and they're dominated by two or three people with lots to say.
That's not what it's for. I like your approach better than ours.
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#104IMO the problem is that people want to buy Agile. They want to pay a consultant, or go to a class, implement a dozen scrum rituals, and call it “agile.”
Agile is not Scrum, Kanban, or even XP. It is the manifesto. It is shipping all the time at a sustainable development pace.
I have had great success implementing agile and I attribute this to continually reindexing on the manifesto and examining the impact of our process. Spoiler: removing processes is a solution as often as it is adding a process. No amount of stand-ups or sprint planning or retrospectives makes your software process a good one.
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#105It’s notable that the ratio of “that’s not really agile” to “this _is_ agile” comments in discussions like this is typically about 10:1. Everyone knows what agile isn’t but no one can seem to explain exactly what it _is_. Furthermore, the “you’re holding it wrong” criticism of everyone who gets poor results from agile, which seems to be a majority of people attempting to use agile practices according to articles like…
That’s the point though, right? There is no one “Agile Methodology”. It’s meant to be a communication protocol you grow within your organisation based on the principals outlined in the manifesto.
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 everyone who is “understanding it wrong”, we give up, discard the term, and focus the pros and cons of specific, describable practices. Agile seems to be more of a feeling than a practice.
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#106I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of agile. Agile isn't Scrum, agile isn't Kanban, Agile isn't even really the manifesto. Agile is, like lean manufacturing (one of its inspirations), based around one really simple concept: the workers know the most about what they are doing and should be leading the charge on what they are doing. If your agile ceremonies end up being all about giving management control -…
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.
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If your agile ceremonies end up being all about giving management control -- if your story points are used to tell management how much work is getting done, if management is using the daily standup to make sure people are on-task instead of being about commitments. Story points being used for the team and to tell management how much work is being done are not mutually exclusive. I'm also not sure of your distinctio…
> 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…
Metric inflation. It’s a thing.
Don’t let anyone show you a two year graph of story points.
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the point though, right? There is no one “Agile Methodology”. It’s meant to be a communication protocol you grow within your organisation based on the principals outlined in the manifesto.
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 people make decisions. If everyone isn’t following the same set of rules and behaviours then there can be a breakdown in communication. Which usually screws things up (whether top down or bottom up)
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I learned a long time was this: A "bad" process that has complete buy-in and everyone participates in will always outperform a "good" process that has lip service buy-in and disagreements about who does what.
Absolutely. I let the pms do their thing and follow the rules. Every organization I've worked with is thrilled when developers get buy in, but guess what your process is still pretty crappy and we just want to make you feel good about it. Positive criticism always falls on deaf ears - "why not just give it a chance" blah blah.
Our agile process has complete buy in from developers.
Yet the product is markedly inferior to the same product we created with fewer developers in a shorter period of time, while also creating the backend services, right before we created this product, when we were not following ‘agile’.
Because the current management approved Agile is just a bunch of rules that are enforced upon us. The previous process was basically an ad god process we had built up using best practices, adapted based on our own experiences with the unique needs of our team. In a sense, we were far more agile when we were not doing Agile.
Re: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad management is Nosferatu: it's a blood-sucker by design. If you take Dracula out of the Carpathian Mountains and move him to Carfax Abbey, Dracula is not going to stop being a blood-sucker, he's just going to start drinking Lucy and Mina's blood. Agile is, to my mind, more likely to get you to the right place than something like waterfall. But all the methodology in the world won't save you if management is bad. P…
I'm going to steal your quote. Sometime I equate the near constant complaint about Agile processes with a hypothetical set of engineers complaining about a 'baseball' process. "The 'Baseball process' sucks because our psychopathic managers beat us with the bats to get us to work harder. If only we switched to the "soccer" process, things would get better because there's nothing for them to hit us with, they'll just p…