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Agile has long been a caricature of itself but a very profitable one. Tools like Rally and Jira will make most experienced developers long for the days of reaso

Agile has long been a caricature of itself but a very profitable one. Tools like Rally and Jira will make most experienced developers long for the days of reasoned waterfall. SAFE, Jira and Rally add so much overhead that a methodology for efficiently navigating that bureaucracy will be its next "revolution". In my experience hour-long standups are routine. Sprints are "timeboxed" deadlines. Customer interaction is as rare as finding hen's teeth. Communication ends the first time anyone on the team realizes its blowback. Agile delivery trains are usually runaways. The effect of daily standups has become the equivalent of Prisoner of War torture techniques; wake up! what have you done! what will you be doing! How many story points? How much time? on and on... every F'n day. Agile dead? No, its being refactored in the Gitmos of Silicon Valley.

sopooneo 6y ago
I may be in the minority, but at my last job I had some pretty great project managers that had us using Jira in a way that was simple and helpful. I think part of that was they had experience and political capital. So they chose to use only about 10% of the functionality, and allowed almost no one to augment their minimal workflow.
- to11mtm 6y ago
  At the first 'Real IT' job I had we started off as Waterfall using Jira. We eventually did transition to agile, and while it was painful, having an Agile coach on contract worked out GREAT. Their job was to teach us agile in 6 months and be out. Once we had switched, our Jira workflow was simple. I think it was the same scenario you outline above though; they had enough experience with Jira in waterfall that they knew what to use and what not to use. Which for us was Epics/Stories/Tasks/Tickets/Bugs, Attaching things, linking together (i.e. being able to track that a story was assigned to a ticket submitted by a user/customer was great for communicating with the business about priorities.) But that was about it.

sopooneo 6y ago

I may be in the minority, but at my last job I had some pretty great project managers that had us using Jira in a way that was simple and helpful. I think part of that was they had experience and political capital. So they chose to use only about 10% of the functionality, and allowed almost no one to augment their minimal workflow.

to11mtm 6y ago
At the first 'Real IT' job I had we started off as Waterfall using Jira. We eventually did transition to agile, and while it was painful, having an Agile coach on contract worked out GREAT. Their job was to teach us agile in 6 months and be out. Once we had switched, our Jira workflow was simple. I think it was the same scenario you outline above though; they had enough experience with Jira in waterfall that they knew what to use and what not to use. Which for us was Epics/Stories/Tasks/Tickets/Bugs, Attaching things, linking together (i.e. being able to track that a story was assigned to a ticket submitted by a user/customer was great for communicating with the business about priorities.) But that was about it.