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I think there's a lot of truth in this (though as with all opinion pieces, esp. seriously entertaining ones like Stevey's, you have to take it with several pinc
by singular 15y ago
I think there's a lot of truth in this (though as with all opinion pieces, esp. seriously entertaining ones like Stevey's, you have to take it with several pinches of salt).
I have a suspicion that a lot of agile is a hack designed for managers who have problems within their team and don't want to deal with them properly.
It's far easier to adopt a 'proven' methodology than confront the fact that Frank in accounts has unrealistic expectations and changes their already vague spec 30 times while expecting the estimate not to change, or that Peter is driving down morale in the team by nitpicking every last mistake you make while ignoring his own, or the constant denial of the impossibility of actually consistently correctly estimating tasks which have never been done before by anyone.
Dealing with those things well takes real skill, patience + awareness as well as a willingness to accept reality and eschew politics, and that's just hard.
What I particularly dislike about agile is the unfalsifiable dogma of it - you MUST do it like this otherwise it won't work and it will be YOUR fault for not having done it properly. If it works then of course it's all agile. That's a big problem - everything you do in a team should be for reasons and open to discussion otherwise you end up with cargo cult programming and cargo cult software management.
All that said, if you take agile not as a dogma but a series of methods that people have found useful and adopt it to your needs, while not avoiding the realities of the situation, then I can see how it can provide prompts for improving a team.
- rsanheim 15y agoThe original agile manifesto was definitely not a dogma. If someone presents it as such today, you can usually follow the money pretty easily to figure out why.
- andy_boot 15y agoGod yes - While working at a large bank I once saw an Agile consultant give a presentation to us. His words: "We find that when teams aren't succeeding with agile it is because they had only adopted some of the agile processes instead of all of it and that hadn't been trained properly by an expert " I threw up a little.
- kabdib 15y agoThis is PRECISELY what you hear from folks who are trying to sell you religion, or stuff like EST. "Of course it's not working, you're not doing it right. We'd be happy to work with you some more on that." Followed by the "ka-Ching!" as they cash your check for the consultancy. Agile is so often turned into a micromanager's paradise that I've just stopped involving myself in it. Our team holds scrums, none of the engineers show up. It's pathetic.
- kragen 15y agoYou'll hear the same thing about any difficult discipline. Surgery, painting, programming, auto repair, biological experiments, chemistry, mechanical engineering, and so on.
- anthonyb 15y agoYeah, the "trained properly by an expert" is a bit of a giveaway, isn't it? That said, I've worked in a scrum team and most of our issues were caused by not following the common sense stuff in scrum, things like "don't change the spec halfway through" or "have a clearly specified story".
- mindcrime 15y agoExactly. In it's original form, there is essentially nothing dogmatic about Agile. That was basically the very point behind it... to focus on core principles, not dogmatic allegiance to certain procedures and processes.
- nahname 15y agoVery true. However, if you are going to pick and choose. Please, please, please, start with communication. Unsurprisingly, I don't know what to build for you if you can't tell me what you need. Face to face communication is the cheapest, most efficient form. Documentation, the most wasteful and expensive.