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I don't doubt that you've experienced this, but frankly it sounds like amateur hour. At any significant scale, with competent leadership, executives will not h

I don't doubt that you've experienced this, but frankly it sounds like amateur hour. At any significant scale, with competent leadership, executives will not have bandwidth to review sprint boards, and are actually looking for the opposite: reliable coarse-grained control. Of course, this requires a lot of trust, which also depends on a critical mass of competence up and down the chain. There may be times when subordinates are getting things wrong, and leaders have to deep dive to understand and correct things (particularly when competence is lacking in the middle management layers), but that is necessarily the exception not the rule. Unfortunately even in healthy orgs where leadership concerns itself with results and appropriately delegates process and execution to experts that understand how the sausage is made, you still find a lot of lower level managers or even ICs who embrace the ceremony and rote process of Agile as a substitute for really reflecting on the quality of the team's output at a higher level and over longer spans of time.

doctor_eval 3y ago
Agree whole hearted with you but sadly amateur hour is all too common among supposedly senior execs. In many companies it seems that people get promoted due to political skill rather than management skill. And micromanagers often appear competent because they can report on exactly why a project failed… leaving out the bit that they strangled it to death while nobody was looking. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
bitwize 3y ago
You don't have time to review every HTTP request as it happens, but if something goes wrong you can examine all of those HTTP requests to find out what. Similarly, IT security at many institutions, including those that handle classified information, seem more concerned with ensuring the culprit can be discovered when a leak happens than with making the information systems more leak-resistant. It's enough for the executives that the information is gathered and the audit trail established. Honestly, getting an auditable log of the developers' thought process is such a wet dream for management at software shops that companies will use any excuse to become a dystopian hellscape in pursuit of it. One such company used the following rubric: Compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley act requires full auditability of anything that may affect the company's stock price, including the software's source code and any changes made thereto. Therefore, all developers must make a log in the bug tracker of what they're doing every 15 minutes to ensure an audit trail of developer activity. Agile just happens to be the excuse that gained traction, because it's easy to dress up as something that's good for developers and it's not as ridiculously onerous as the above.

doctor_eval 3y ago

Agree whole hearted with you but sadly amateur hour is all too common among supposedly senior execs. In many companies it seems that people get promoted due to political skill rather than management skill. And micromanagers often appear competent because they can report on exactly why a project failed… leaving out the bit that they strangled it to death while nobody was looking. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

bitwize 3y ago

You don't have time to review every HTTP request as it happens, but if something goes wrong you can examine all of those HTTP requests to find out what. Similarly, IT security at many institutions, including those that handle classified information, seem more concerned with ensuring the culprit can be discovered when a leak happens than with making the information systems more leak-resistant. It's enough for the executives that the information is gathered and the audit trail established. Honestly, getting an auditable log of the developers' thought process is such a wet dream for management at software shops that companies will use any excuse to become a dystopian hellscape in pursuit of it. One such company used the following rubric: Compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley act requires full auditability of anything that may affect the company's stock price, including the software's source code and any changes made thereto. Therefore, all developers must make a log in the bug tracker of what they're doing every 15 minutes to ensure an audit trail of developer activity. Agile just happens to be the excuse that gained traction, because it's easy to dress up as something that's good for developers and it's not as ridiculously onerous as the above.