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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)

#91

Post by kyllo »

lbatx wrote: post #45
cwyers wrote: post #15

I 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 -…

> 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 rewards.

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

#92

Post by cwyers »

kyllo wrote: post #91
lbatx wrote: post #45

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. 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…

Yes. Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." As soon as management starts looking at story points, it's a scramble to get the most points possible in a sprint (or at least, to not let velocity go down).

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

#93

Post by Aloisius »

yebyen wrote: post #90
Aloisius wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 minutes? Even 5 minutes is long. With an average 7 person scrum team, they should take no more than 3 minutes. I disagree talking about yesterday provides no value. Talking about yesterday, in my experience, dramatically improves people's ability to accurately identify and prioritize what they have to do today. Plus, it provides a forum to communicate unexpected interruptions that may need to be dealt with by the…

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 everyone isn't aware of all the work to be done and it isn't an appropriate forum in a cross-functional team to go into details. People do that after with the people interested.

The only time I've found people run over 5 minutes is if the person running the meeting is lax or if meeting doesn't start on time.

I guess sometimes another meeting happening after might get rolled in, but then it isn't a standup.

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

#94

Post by iovrthoughtthis »

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…

If it’s not safe to say “I got nothing done yesterday” at your standup then it’s a waste of time. Stand-ups are not about accountability, they are about discovery.

If people are talking about anything other than; what I did, what my impediments are and what am I planning to do then they are wasting time. Book an actual meeting after the standup to discuss things.

If there are too many people to remember to book meetings after the stand up, your stand up is too large.

It can take < 60 seconds for each person in a stand up to cover the 3 questions. If people take longer they should be more concise and focus on only the important things. We probably don’t need the nitty details. It’s ok to practice this.

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

#96

Post by iovrthoughtthis »

sequoia wrote: post #87

It’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.

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

#97

Post by iovrthoughtthis »

sethammons wrote: post #31
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…

I imagine stuff like this is why kanban was developed.

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

#98

Post by snarf21 »

loriverkutya wrote: post #44
snarf21 wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

It's hard to imagine, that a bad process has complete buy-in.

I meant "bad" as in perception. A lot of people think waterfall is "bad".

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

#99

Post by jaytaylor »

0_gravitas wrote: post #74
satyrnein wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So the companies always had a successful exit even if the codebase passed onto the acquiring company or to the public investors had major issues.. so at least in my experience there's no feedback loop to correct the issues. In a sense, it sounds like there is nothing to correct! Would moving more slowly and deliberately have improved the exit, or worsened it? Perhaps code quality has only a tenuous link to business…

Perhaps Extreme Go Horse has some wisdom behind it after all

Reference: https://medium.com/@dekaah/22-axioms-of-the-extreme-go-horse...

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

#100

Post by dilyevsky »

opportune wrote: post #50
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…

I cannot agree more with the assessment that agile works well with front end and poorly with backend. Agile with the backend/infrastructure actively encourages taking on technical debt just to get something, anything up and running as quickly as possible. Which is great for PMs' careers but terrible for the developers who have to maintain those systems, and ultimately the organization as a whole. Maybe it's even grea…

I think it depends. It does protect from overcomplicated designs that never come to fruition in accordance with Gall’s Law (See Googles Omega). And nobody will care how much extra debt you saved down the line if company seizes to exist because it was outpaced by competition so there’s definitely some trade offs to be made.

The last part is more of a problem with hard maintenance work being unappreciated compared to launching new shiny shit which is entirely different can of worms.

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