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To me, I think everyone took the processes WAY too literally which caused the whole big "A" Agile versus little "a" agile. I have seen many orgs get super wrap

by dberg 8y ago

To me, I think everyone took the processes WAY too literally which caused the whole big "A" Agile versus little "a" agile. I have seen many orgs get super wrapped up in all the typical nonsense of stories "falling over", religion about who owns the backlog which takes away autonomy of the team, religion about the process for breaking a sprint as new discoveries are made, arguing over product work versus addressing tech debt or working on automation, etc. You end up focusing more on "being agile" than delivering new features. I 100% agree with the other comment around "checkin" points so that work doesn't linger forever, but the forced short delivery boundaries very likely slow teams down overall especially when all the process overhead of points, backlog grooming, standups, sprint planning, demo session, etc are all factored in and mandatory every 2 weeks. Commit to some scope, on some cadence/date, loosely check in on progress, and adjust as needed as a team. Deliver as frequently as possible and demo your work when you can/should.

MBCook 8y ago
This sounds pretty accurate to what I’ve witnessed. I’ve seen Agile done well, which I really liked. Mostly what I see is water scrum. It’s important to pack every single thing you can into a sprint based on your estimate of points, otherwise you’re wasting precious resources. Of course that means you never get everything done so huge chunk of the sprint always rules over. Everything is dictated from the top, there is no autonomy on the part of the team (or almost none). As bad as all this is, a quickly falls apart whenever something doesn’t go exactly the plan. In other words, constantly. So you just get further behind and more things roll over into the next sprint. They’re “agile”. They hold demos of the tiny bit that got done and congratulate themselves. Because they don’t do waterfall anymore. They GET IT. But none of the benefits. Because that would require actual change.

by dberg 8y ago

MBCook 8y ago

This sounds pretty accurate to what I’ve witnessed. I’ve seen Agile done well, which I really liked. Mostly what I see is water scrum. It’s important to pack every single thing you can into a sprint based on your estimate of points, otherwise you’re wasting precious resources. Of course that means you never get everything done so huge chunk of the sprint always rules over. Everything is dictated from the top, there is no autonomy on the part of the team (or almost none). As bad as all this is, a quickly falls apart whenever something doesn’t go exactly the plan. In other words, constantly. So you just get further behind and more things roll over into the next sprint. They’re “agile”. They hold demos of the tiny bit that got done and congratulate themselves. Because they don’t do waterfall anymore. They GET IT. But none of the benefits. Because that would require actual change.