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This misses on the most important part of agile/scrum/lean... retrospectives. To understand lean, you have to understand its roots in operations management and
by programminggeek 12y ago
This misses on the most important part of agile/scrum/lean... retrospectives.
To understand lean, you have to understand its roots in operations management and lean production methods at Toyota and other companies. The whole purpose is not predictable planning, it's continuous process improvement.
It's the process of improving your process.
If you were doing agile or async right, you would start with a process or manifesto or whatever, and then you'd use it for some period of time, say a 2 week sprint, then at the end you talk about what works and what doesn't, and what needs to change to get better.
You try the changes and after 2 weeks you talk again, and again, and again until after a few months the process you have looks a lot different in big and small ways than it did when you started.
Nearly every criticism of agile feels hollow to me because they all bemoan the meetings or the planning or the cards or whatever and instead of having a team retrospective, fixing the process, and finding a better way... they trash agile.
If you are doing agile right, your processes will change and improve over time and that's a good thing. When your process stops changing and stops improving, you've lost.
Async manifesto is maybe a nice starting point for teams, but it's a woefully suboptimal end point for teams. We can do better than this.
Never stop improving.
- EdwardDiego 12y agoExactly, and when you ask people who "have done Scrum and it was terrible!" if they raised their problems with the process in a retrospective and if so, what happened, that's usually what identifies the issue. Seems like a lot of people don't take retrospective seriously, or don't speak up during one, or their organisation completely ignore the outcomes of it. And as you say, they've missed the biggest point - consider your process, and iteratively improve it.
- kethinov 12y agoIt seems the opposite to me. There's nothing stopping you from continually improving processes under the async model. On the other hand, Scrum retrospectives are token at best because they assume the premises of Scrum. You can't adopt any reforms unless those reforms fit into the narrowly-tailored practices of Scrum. As such, any reforms that involve replacing the daily standup meeting, the sprint planning meeting, or changing anything about how Scrum works at all are not open to discussion. How is that "Agile?"
- icambron 12y ago> You can't adopt any reforms unless those reforms fit into the narrowly-tailored practices of Scrum. I don't think Scrum is nearly that dogmatic in its posture or that inflexible in its prescriptions, but even if I'm wrong, maybe you should consider adopting Scrum-but-without-the-rigidity-you-think-it-has. Of course you can do as you please; you don't need a new capitalized term to make that true.
- kethinov 12y agoAnecdotally, whenever I try to suggest Scrum-but-without-the-rigidity, I just get dogmatic "that's not Scrum" responses.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> As such, any reforms that involve replacing the daily standup meeting, the sprint planning meeting, or changing anything about how Scrum works at all are not open to discussion. How is that "Agile?" Its not. Scrum is a collection of practices (many of which may have been developed through an Agile-like attitude wherever they originated) dictated, adopted, packaged, and sold as exactly the kind of processes-over-people-and-interactions manner against which the Agile Manifesto is a reaction. Almost all of the individual practices of Scrum are good ideas to consider (whether or not they should be applied is organization-specific) in Agile/Lean organizations, but Scrum, qua Scrum, is not Agile.
- qznc 12y agoSo here is my Manifesto of Eventually Awesome Development of Anything: 1. Write down a process (Waterfall, Agile, Cowboy, whatever) 2. Regularly reconsider and improve the process
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 12y agoAgile isn't a process (the popularity of Scrum and its incorrect description as if it was equivalent to Agile confuses this.) Agile is basically what you describe, (Lean is more explicitly so.)
- programminggeek 12y agoThat's exactly right. The only thing you ever know for sure is you can always improve the process.