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> Agile itself has no real original ideas Core to the 12 Principles, and thus Agile by extension, is the idea of no managers. Each of the 12 items exists to ge
by randomdata 3y ago
> Agile itself has no real original ideas
Core to the 12 Principles, and thus Agile by extension, is the idea of no managers. Each of the 12 items exists to get you thinking about what developers (and the business people!) need to do if there is no manager acting as the guiding force.
While no managers is not a novel idea in a vacuum, it isn't something organizations usually think about. It's just the unspoken expectation that there will be managers once you have enough people to form a team.
> hopelessly naive about the way people, and companies, actually work.
Indeed. One of the 12 principles is quite explicit that it will not work with any Random Joe; that you need very specific people who are motivated to make an organization function without management helping them. Much as you want to pretend you are not Random Joe, you are, and it literally tells you that it won't work for you.
- nradov 3y agoThe original agile manifesto is silent on the topic of management. Self-organizing teams are a good practice, but once you scale up and have to coordinate the work of many teams across a huge portfolio it generally becomes necessary to have some level of hierarchical management in order to prevent chaos and dysfunction. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
- eesmith 3y agoI don't see how that "no managers" core can be true. Many of the principles, like "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale." are valid even for solo developer projects. Agile came out of older practices, like Rapid Development, which definitely could be used by solo developers. Several of the principles do imply the existence of multiple people - #4 implies business people are distinct from developers - but still apply to a two-person company, like married friends I knew who ran their own software company where the wife handled the business and the husband the development and there was no manager. If there are no managers, then either everything they do is Agile (because there are no managers) or nothing they do is Agile (because "Agile" can't be applied). If the former, then a solo developer following waterfall is Agile. If the latter then what alternative principles can be applied to solo- and partnership developer projects?
- pjmlp 3y agoWhich is why it shouldn't be no one's surprise that after 20 years we ended up like this. I have been through multiple ways of doing agile, since the manifesto, and I really only saw it work on tiny startups full of idealistic engineers.