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> 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, i

> 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, it won't "work." This is exactly what it has become though. It's not about developers, it's about managers and product owners. It's about numbers in a spreadsheet that managers can show upper managers. Management has sucked the life out of agile. It's become this rigid metric producing muck that gets in the way.

cwyers 7y ago
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. Putting the blame in the right place is a good place to start, though. If you're living through a bad agile process, saying "I hate bad management" puts the blame in a more correct place than "I hate agile."
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  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.
- jboy55 7y ago
  I'm going to steal your quote. Sometime I equate the near constant complaint about Agile processes with a hypothetical set of engineers complaining about a 'baseball' process. "The 'Baseball process' sucks because our psychopathic managers beat us with the bats to get us to work harder. If only we switched to the "soccer" process, things would get better because there's nothing for them to hit us with, they'll just punch and kick us. "
  - cafard 7y ago
    https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/ https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/

cwyers 7y ago

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. Putting the blame in the right place is a good place to start, though. If you're living through a bad agile process, saying "I hate bad management" puts the blame in a more correct place than "I hate agile."

dragonwriter 7y ago
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.
jboy55 7y ago
I'm going to steal your quote. Sometime I equate the near constant complaint about Agile processes with a hypothetical set of engineers complaining about a 'baseball' process. "The 'Baseball process' sucks because our psychopathic managers beat us with the bats to get us to work harder. If only we switched to the "soccer" process, things would get better because there's nothing for them to hit us with, they'll just punch and kick us. "
- cafard 7y ago
  https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/ https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/