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> in a meeting-heavy agile environment Everytime I see that, I cringe. But sadly, you're not wrong. Agile is anti-meeting, anti-heavy and definitely anti-me
by mpweiher 3y ago
> in a meeting-heavy agile environment
Everytime I see that, I cringe. But sadly, you're not wrong.
Agile is anti-meeting, anti-heavy and definitely anti-meeting-heavy.
I really don't know what to call this weird thing that was created.
Just as an example: why are there standups? Because in XP, meetings are frowned upon. So the idea is not to have meetings whenever humanly possible (better to pair up, talk to individuals etc.).
And if there's a meeting you really really can't avoid or eliminate, let's at the very least incentivise everyone to keep it as short and meaningful as possible. By having everyone stand and thus be slightly uncomfortable.
How that fun, focused, no-nonsense, get-things-done approach got turned into ... whatever that "meeting-heavy" thing is ... is in some senses fascinating.
And terrifying.
> I'm currently in a no-jira, no-meeting, get-it-done environment
AKA, an agile environment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- orra 3y agoDon't get me started. The agile manifesto says “individuals and interactions over processes”. So, of course a whole industry popped up of managers (and agile consultants) prescribing scrum. In practice, it's not unlike waterfall, because requirements and timetables are prescribed from above. But hey, the team has a sprint kickoff meeting every two weeks, so we call it agile.
- JamesBarney 3y agoIt's so much worse than waterfall. Every "agile" shop I've worked at still had deadlines 6 months out, they just didn't give you any time to design and estimate our the work because it was "agile". They were all twice as process heavy and had twice as many meetings as the shops that didn't call themselves "agile".
- steveBK123 3y agoYeah instead of defining where we need to be in 6 months and the steps needed to get there, we micro-focus on the next 1 week of work. It's almost like Manhattan projecting your own team, except theres no one who actually knows the full picture. Amounts to short term "wins" and constantly missing the actual target.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoIt’s fun talking about Agile as something different from agile. If a team practices Agile, they’re not likely to be agile.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoOn a tangent, a metric I've found strongly inversely correlated to productivity is average-mentions-of-"agile"-per-meeting. I've seen teams with AMAPA scores of 5+, holy crap what a shit storm that was.
- Frost1x 3y ago>I really don't know what to call this weird thing that was created. Micromanagement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement It's not a new concept, agile and project management tools around it decided to break things into small enough components that they essentially just streamlined and concretized micromanagement as a normal accepted daily business process. That's all "agile" is in practice in most case. If you see "agile" substitute "micromanagement" and everything that happens will make complete sense.
- bombolo 3y agoagile is like the no true Scotsman. There's never a true agile :D
- steveBK123 3y agoYeah it cracks me up every time. 90% of people are like "the agile industrial complex is killing my job" and the other 10% are like "well you haven't REALLY done agile because..".
- mpweiher 3y agoBoth of these can be true at the same time. And in fact ARE true. The Agile Industrial Complex is a horror show, but that doesn't mean it's not possible to do agile well. There absolutely is a way of doing agile well, I've been involved in a number of teams that did. And it worked extremely well. In fact, we did agile way before the agile manifesto came out, and before I was aware of there being a name for the things we were doing. We were just doing them because they make sense, they make us go fast and they let us have fun while doing it. Which is basically what the XP people said when they started writing things down. They never claimed to have invented a brand new way of creating software. No, they were observing that certain teams were very productive, and looked at what those teams were doing. If there was a pattern. Spoiler: there was. Anyway, I also introduced agile "practices" in a large company. Well, in a small team in a large company. We didn't do a single one of the practices the Agile Industrial Complex proposes and often mandates. The much more important team next to us did. They did all the AIC practices. We did the technical. And interacted closely. Did TDD, worked on trunk, paired when necessary, did stuff alone when not. Did the simplest thing that could possible work. ("Where's your database?" "We'll put it in when we need it". <later> "Oh we're done. I guess we didn't need the database ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" ). The more important team next to us that was doing Scrum with the standups and whathaveyounot failed. We delivered. Hmm. And if you can point to the practices being promoted by the AIC as being in direct and obvious conflict with, for example, what's written the Agile Manifesto, and can in fact point to ways of doing it right that are in harmony with the AM and in conflict with the AIC, then it ain't a No True Scotsman fallacy. It's a simple case of the AIC doing it wrong.
- _ea1k 3y agoJust wait until the Scaled "Agile" Framework[1] experts help to improve your efficiency with even more process overhead. [1] They weren't even concise with the acronym. Hey, lets throw a random e on the end!
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoScaled Agile Framework is possibly the least agile thing anyone has ever done.
- _ea1k 3y agoI completely agree. I've honestly been amazed at how many people are willing to advocate for it. TBH, I'd have a lot more respect for it if the framework were sold honestly, as something completely opposite of agile. There's merit to a non-agile approach, but the dishonesty is something that I find very distasteful.