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Too many companies try to “do Agile” in a prescriptive way and lose sight on being agile in the process. The concept is solid, but the implementations are all o

Too many companies try to “do Agile” in a prescriptive way and lose sight on being agile in the process. The concept is solid, but the implementations are all over the place. I’ve definitely seen agile work well, but I’d confidently say most companies aren’t doing it well. Just last week I had a client request that I create a “user story” for my access to a system so I could actually work on the project. It can get crazy out there.

RayFrankenstein 3y ago
One of the problems with agile is that it demands that every act of developer productivity be couched in a user story, a user-visible unit of change. And the catch-22 is that only things that “deliver value” can be user stories, only things that are user stories can easily get into backlog, and only by doing things in the backlog can a developer prove they’ve done actual work that justifies them continuing to have a job at the company. So to get around this restriction for something that isn’t a user-facing feature, devs have to be creative and you end up with these completely insane-sounding user stories like “As a user whose data is stored in the database, I would like the database schema to be overhauled so it can support a many-to-many relationship”. Agile fails because it gives management fine-grained control over developers’ todo lists.