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Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

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Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#61

Post by Celeo »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #52

I've seen Agile at a handful of shops, a couple dozen projects. I've seen it implemented well just once... The "scrum master" was a dedicated role, filled by a technically able person, who sometimes helped a little bit with the coding. This individual had read several books and taken a course on Agile. They were sincerely passionate about Agile and wanted to implement it effectively. The "project manager", a DIFFEREN…

I'd certainly like to be in an environment that has the dedicated people to those roles that so often are either combined or eschewed entirely, but 16+ hours of meetings per sprint sounds incredibly draining.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#62

Post by pjmlp »

bosie wrote: post #33
zorpner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I earn the respect every day I come in How much of each dollar you make for the company with your hard work do you take home?

Any advice on how to calculate the first?

For consultancy, the hourly rate the customer is paying to the employer versus what actually lands on the bank account at the end of the month.

For product development, the price of licenses and support deals per month, correlated to the hourly cost of everyone on the office, and then what actually lands on the bank account at the end of the month.

As for how much money it costs me an FTE to play around something outside the planned roadmap, their monthly salary divided by the amount of hours they are supposed to be working per month, correlated with the time spent on said activity.

Actually I have been in a couple of projects, where instead of sprint points or hours, we actually had euros as ticket efforts.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#63

Post by arendtio »

lalos wrote: post #13

Agile got widespread adoptions because of the micromanagement undertone of it, starting with the daily scrum. It's a slippery slope, way to easy to over do. The risk is it starts something to be gamed/incentivized instead of actual progress.

I think the fuss about the daily scrum is a perfect example of what is wrong with many Agile transformations.

Often it seems that people talk about the 'micromanagement' and 'wasted time' as if they would not enjoy the daily. To me this is a warning, that something within the setup is not right. In general, micromanagement requires hierarchy, but I don't recall from the Scrum Guide [1] that a manager should be present or that directions should be given. So who is managing who?

If done right, there should be absolutely no reason why there should be negative emotions involved: The devs get together and talk about their work and the challenges they want to share. It is about fostering communication.

[1] https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#64

Post by travisgriggs »

I was at OOPLSA 1998 where it was going viral. Participated in the early C2 wiki. Participated in some of the early "workshops" on this upstart rebel movement.

Raised in a christian tradition, and somewhat a student of history of christianity, I was fascinated by parallels that unfolded in months` time what took place over centuries in christianity.

5 years after the movement began, I found that it felt as watered down, abstracted, and diverse as christianity spent 2000 years becoming. I could bond with a fellow programmer as an "agilist" and at a very vague level, there was some abstract similarity (e.g as christianity might be to "be kind", agile might be to "be lightweight"). Everyone took the parts they wanted and formulated what fit for them. Which was/is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#65

Post by pjmlp »

xamde wrote: post #22
throwaway290232 wrote: post #18

Agile is a generic umbrella term that involves a vast array of complex, subtle knowledge and skills. It's like saying "Engineer", or "Chef". Each has a shared skillset, to be sure. But each category's members can't just work the same way at all jobs, and there's no book on how to be an Engineer or Chef everywhere. The Agile Manifesto is a failure at trying to make Agile happen because it can't tell you how to make it…

Nice explanation. Amusingly, it explains why NO kind of informed change can happen in a hierarchical organisation.

The old Microsoft (the new one is much better at this), you couldn't just go around sharing department knowledge, if you on lets say Visual Basic team wanted the deep knowledge for a Windows feature as means to product improvement, it was easier to have a neutral contractor somehow get hold of the information across departments, than asking directly as Microsoft employee.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#66

Post by jordanbeiber »

koonsolo wrote: post #34
archeantus wrote: post #4

I really enjoyed this read. I’ve been grinding for so long in the huge corporation version of agile that I don’t even know what is what anymore. It was refreshing to hear their take on project managers, as it matches how I’ve been feeling recently. They schedule 7 checkpoint meetings per week and I’ve given up on attending, I just can’t do it anymore. I hope that we can move past agile into a new world that is free o…

Agile should include retrospectives, and retrospectives should allow your team to change anything within the process as you need. In fact, all agile needs is good retrospectives, and all the rest you can decide there.

This is true. Being agile is, and should be, an ever changing process. You are never done.

It’s like shaping a system of people. I think of it as 50% of the development endeavor at larger shops.

Retros are used to identify ”technical organization debt” starting to build up, in a way.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#67

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

koonsolo wrote: post #34
archeantus wrote: post #4

I really enjoyed this read. I’ve been grinding for so long in the huge corporation version of agile that I don’t even know what is what anymore. It was refreshing to hear their take on project managers, as it matches how I’ve been feeling recently. They schedule 7 checkpoint meetings per week and I’ve given up on attending, I just can’t do it anymore. I hope that we can move past agile into a new world that is free o…

Agile should include retrospectives, and retrospectives should allow your team to change anything within the process as you need. In fact, all agile needs is good retrospectives, and all the rest you can decide there.

IN my experience, the same two or three people speak up in retrospectives… and no one else, ever.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#68

Post by pjmlp »

habitue wrote: post #19

I think the big divide here is between tech companies and non tech companies. Tech companies can look at the agile manifesto and use it as a heuristic guide, because engineers are already kind of on the same page about it. You don't need heavyweight process etc. Non tech-companies need the window dressing of tech companies to retain their best engineers, but ultimately agile is kinda telling them to turn everything u…

Yes, pretty much this.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#69

Post by sagarm »

Celeo wrote: post #61
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #52

I've seen Agile at a handful of shops, a couple dozen projects. I've seen it implemented well just once... The "scrum master" was a dedicated role, filled by a technically able person, who sometimes helped a little bit with the coding. This individual had read several books and taken a course on Agile. They were sincerely passionate about Agile and wanted to implement it effectively. The "project manager", a DIFFEREN…

I'd certainly like to be in an environment that has the dedicated people to those roles that so often are either combined or eschewed entirely, but 16+ hours of meetings per sprint sounds incredibly draining.

Plus two people!

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#70

Post by hyperman1 »

ipaddr wrote: post #39
emptysongglass wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's why things like "Agile", "DevOps", etc will fail. I completely disagree. Most team leads and technical managers where I've worked get promoted up from within a highly technical position. I wouldn't have any respect for my team lead or my PM if they didn't know what they were talking about. If my PM is going to try to tell me that I should work on this feature over this other feature or I should implement…

That's a junior approach thinking you know more than your pm and have no respect if they didn't come from your ranks. In the end if you are difficult you become easy to replace.

I'll give 2 examples.

One was a CEO who hadn't any technical background, but he knew what ICT could and could not do for his company.

One day we rewired all of our network, a massive weekend job. He was there, even if the only thing he could do was pulling network cables out of bags and straightening them. He saw who and what worked or not, he saw where we struggled even if he didn't understand a word of our technical mumbo jumbo.

I found out he was always there on the ground for every major operation in his company, not only ICT. The result was he knew the company inside out. Nobody ever tried bullshitting him. I still have massive respect for him, years later.

Then there is exhibit B, a manager from the 'you dont have to understand ICT to manage it' school. Everybody under him spends 3/4 of the time in meetings or filing useless forms. Nobody dares touching important things, so hard decisions get pushed in the future. It happens urgent work needs doing and the only person capable of doing it sits twiddling thumbs as the spreadsheet says maximum team capacity has already been reached. He redefined the words 'major incident' as there were to many under the old definition. His teams keep losing important members, everybody hates each other, work that should take 10 minutes takes months. But he always has a spreadsheet demonstrating it is not his fault.

I know who gets the respect.

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