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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)

#31

Post by sethammons »

legitster wrote: post #23

I work at a large national software company who shall remain nameless. At some point, they determined that "we are now Agile" and put all work in a tracking software, and everything must now be assigned to sprints. But if you dig any amount of depth down it becomes ridiculous. An example I found, the helpdesk literally has one project every sprint ("Ticket resolution: February Sprint 1", "Ticket resolution: February…

> 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 smooth flow that gets to market quicker now _must_ be lock step gated by sprint start dates. /me sighs

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

#33

Post by dragonwriter »

cwyers wrote: post #25
throwaway55554 wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

Agile was a reaction against particular problems in management, the Agile manifesto is directed at them on a conceptual level, but the Agile body of work (unlike Lean) has largely avoided solutions to the problem Agile is a reaction against and largely consists of solutions to lower-level problems that take for granted that the high level problem is already solved.

Which is why it seems to “work well” in young organizations with relatively small, hands-on engineering-heavy teams without several layers of non-technical (in practice, regardless of past experience) management—those aren't the places where the problems tend to exist in the first place.

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

#34

Post by wool_gather »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #11
AndrewDucker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they following the Agile Manifesto? https://agilemanifesto.org/ If so, then it is. If not, then it isn't.

How can anyone put "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" while also using processes and tools? Maybe agile is apostate waterfall, and we might as well do waterfall.

Pretty simple: by being willing to discard or alter processes and tools that prevent people doing useful work.

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

#36

Post by snarf21 »

ben7799 wrote: post #9

I'm ready for what comes next after Agile. I've been through about 5 Agile shops now. I would say one of the 5 ran Agile well, the rest were a mess that just makes it frustrating for everyone. What we mostly have now is watered down agile.. the worst bits of agile like never actually "designing" anything, but we don't really have any of the good bits of the older management processes left over. I don't really want fu…

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.

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

#37

Post by hnruss »

I'm working on a project right now that lacks well-specified requirements, yet we're barreling ahead with the implantation. I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen. My guess is that we'll end up with an MVP that meets the known requirements, but then we'll have to rewrite some part of it to meet the as-yet-unspecified requirements.

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

#38

Post by eitland »

snarf21 wrote: post #36
ben7799 wrote: post #9

I'm ready for what comes next after Agile. I've been through about 5 Agile shops now. I would say one of the 5 ran Agile well, the rest were a mess that just makes it frustrating for everyone. What we mostly have now is watered down agile.. the worst bits of agile like never actually "designing" anything, but we don't really have any of the good bits of the older management processes left over. I don't really want fu…

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.

While I wouldn't be so absolute ("will always") I think you have a great point.

I'll add it to my quote file, file under quotes by snarf21 :-)

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

#39

Post by codeflo »

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…

I know what you describe is common, but the purpose of the daily really isn’t to boast about your heroic achievements of yesterday, or give a status report to management. That part should be cut out entirely much of the time.

A better idea is to plan the current day, identify where someone could use help, where two people need to coordinate more closely or on what issues further discussion is needed and with whom. If there’s nothing to discuss because everyone is already on the same page, that’s great, cut the meeting short and start working.

Also, depending on your setup, people who can never usefully work together on anything probably shouldn’t be part of the same daily standup. I’ve seen several cases where this meeting was way, way too large.

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

#40

Post by walshemj »

cryptonector wrote: post #28
walshemj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no it doesn't referring to "agile nonsense" is a real red flag. Real Agile RAD /DSDM really does work best with collocated teams and experienced developers not lowest bid outsourced talent. I have worked on both RAD and OSI 9000 (BS5750) waterfall projects so I have experience in both types of development. Oh my Second RAD project was featured at the IEEE and when I was younger I worked with the BSI in the e…

GP said nothing about "lowest bid outsourced talent". "remote work" != "lowest bid outsourced talent".

Oh I think I could safely assume that from the dismissive tone
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