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Capital 'A' Agile has become a total anti-pattern, and the most revealing signs of this are the two-week sprint, excessive meetings, and lack of technical leade
by fidotron 3y ago
Capital 'A' Agile has become a total anti-pattern, and the most revealing signs of this are the two-week sprint, excessive meetings, and lack of technical leadership.
By far the most productive teams I've worked with have been on six week iterations, with an at least approximate idea of what they're supposed to achieve in the next 90 days. One week out of that six is basically given over to demo, retro, and working out what the next one should achieve, but there is enough slack in there to accommodate the inevitable ups and downs, which two week Agile/Scrum pretends is not a thing. The lead developer is almost entirely focused on integrating the work of the others, and building strategy for the next iteration with product/marketing and the other team leads.
The other incredible tendency of highly productive teams is a lack of communication . . . because they don't need it. It may be more accurate to class this as a lack of noise, and clarity over what needs delivering. (i.e. product and the leads have done their job). I used to have to visit different teams in many locations, and you could tell how productive they were just by how quiet it was, interrupted only with the occasional "Dave, you broke the build!"
- regularfry 3y agoAnd that's great if your organisation has an attention span resembling something other than the usual squirrel on crack. The failure mode of iterations that long in my experience is incessant "can you just take a look at X, we need it for next week" interruptions that balloon out to consume the team's attention. With a 90 day iteration you can't say "let's get that into the next sprint (and leave me alone until then)" as often as you can with a two week or a one week sprint.
- rajvarkala 3y ago[dead]
- bick_nyers 3y agoI am definitely more productive on the 6 week cycle, the 2 week cycle was too much overhead and friction for me, however I do recognize that some individuals (who were more senior than me) were more productive after our org. transitioned to the 2 week cycle, although I suspect this was more a result of higher oversight/scrutiny in their day to day more than anything. I tend to view the work that I do as more engineering than it is development, frequently having to pull out the paper and math it out, so I think the problems I tend to work on are just fundamentally more difficult to corral into 2 week estimation chunks, but that could just be ego talking. When I started making investigation/research its own estimate that helped a bit. I think it's harder to investigate, justify, and perform significant refactors (or rewrites) on the 2 week sprint cycle, but not every team needs to do that all the time.
- gardenhedge 3y agoHow does a 6 week cycle work for planning? We do 3 weeks but each HOUR has to be assigned to a developer which obviously isn't accurate.
- fidotron 3y agoI mean, you know this, but 3 or 6 weeks isn't going to help if your problem is unrealistic micromanagement. The underlying management problem there is they're more concerned about hours worked than work completed.