4 ms·

At my workplace we're semi-agile but it's been mostly in response to middle and upper managers, who want to claim to be agile. Our practices haven't changed all

At my workplace we're semi-agile but it's been mostly in response to middle and upper managers, who want to claim to be agile. Our practices haven't changed all that much, to be honest. Initially we were aiming for full-blown agile but it felt like too much of a straight jacket and there was a lot of resentment against being micromanaged.

mindcrime 9y ago
Initially we were aiming for full-blown agile but it felt like too much of a straight jacket and there was a lot of resentment against being micromanaged. There is no such thing as "agile". Were they talking about Scrum, SAFE, XP, Crystal, AgileUP or what? And in either case, if what was being pitched involved a lot of micromanagement and felt like a "straight jacket" then you can pretty much say that, by definition, it was not a valid implementation of the principles of the Agile Manifesto. Unless your comparing to a complete "cowboy coding" environment with no process at all, in which case even the most lightweight process might feel constraining...
- zwieback 9y ago
  In our case Scrum was the favored methodology. I'm not arguing against Agile or even Scrum, by the way. I've been following and dreaming about working in a team like they described on the Extreme Programming pages on c2.com years before Agile was a twinkle in our managers' eyes. However, in our case implementing something closer to the pure ideal of the Agile Manifesto proved too challenging: - In internal SW projects it's difficult to find a customer that's willing to put in the time required to drive the development. - Everyone has multiple jobs, some include ME and EE that are hard to agilify - Managers don't really want to turn over scheduling authority to the team - Exploratory and learning takes a backseat to knocking items off the backlog
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    Everyone has multiple jobs, some include ME and EE that are hard to agilify - Managers don't really want to turn over scheduling authority to the team - Exploratory and learning takes a backseat to knocking items off the backlog Yeah, that's usually what happens. It's a shame too. :-(

mindcrime 9y ago

Initially we were aiming for full-blown agile but it felt like too much of a straight jacket and there was a lot of resentment against being micromanaged. There is no such thing as "agile". Were they talking about Scrum, SAFE, XP, Crystal, AgileUP or what? And in either case, if what was being pitched involved a lot of micromanagement and felt like a "straight jacket" then you can pretty much say that, by definition, it was not a valid implementation of the principles of the Agile Manifesto. Unless your comparing to a complete "cowboy coding" environment with no process at all, in which case even the most lightweight process might feel constraining...

zwieback 9y ago
In our case Scrum was the favored methodology. I'm not arguing against Agile or even Scrum, by the way. I've been following and dreaming about working in a team like they described on the Extreme Programming pages on c2.com years before Agile was a twinkle in our managers' eyes. However, in our case implementing something closer to the pure ideal of the Agile Manifesto proved too challenging: - In internal SW projects it's difficult to find a customer that's willing to put in the time required to drive the development. - Everyone has multiple jobs, some include ME and EE that are hard to agilify - Managers don't really want to turn over scheduling authority to the team - Exploratory and learning takes a backseat to knocking items off the backlog
- mindcrime 9y ago
  Everyone has multiple jobs, some include ME and EE that are hard to agilify - Managers don't really want to turn over scheduling authority to the team - Exploratory and learning takes a backseat to knocking items off the backlog Yeah, that's usually what happens. It's a shame too. :-(