Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far
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I saw this
I thought it was a joke and he was making shit up.
Then I read this
http://www.full-stackagile.com/2016/02/14/team-organisation-squads-chapters-tribes-and-guilds/
Wow. What in the name of fuck?!
I think this is on us because instead of putting a stop to this we stood on the sidelines and laughed at it and then suddenly we're here. I hope this entire thing is satire like the OP from codingconfessional says.
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I worked in agile taken too far, although not as fucked up as this, it was completely bonkers.
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@stillwater Meh, the question is not whether the name is silly — it is — but whether their process works.
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@MrL Is it like roleplay but in a professional environment? Is everyone aware that someone took a joke too far and everyone has to play along?
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@stillwater the team structure doesn’t seem completely bonkers, but the naming might actually be enought to ruin it.
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@stillwater Do you get boffer swords?
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Spotify also renames their development teams ‘Squads’ which is a cool idea to get over the stigma that a Development Team should only contain developers.
What the actual fuck?
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@stillwater Sounds like a gamified form of SAFe which is shit.
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@JBert it doesn't. it creates a fun set of added artificial status boundaries and siloes to fuck up the already fucked up flow of information.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
stigma that a Development Team should only contain developers.
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And here I was thinking that having to deal with just one "scrum team" is bad enough, I can't even imagine having to work in this sort of madness...
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Look, Agile already has "epics" and "stories". This is not any sillier.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
What the actual fuck?
"Software development" includes programmers, UX experts, writers (if there's documentation), graphic artists (for your UI), etc.
If they're defining "developers" are "programmers", that's their OWN issue, not a universal one.
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@anonymous234 Needs "sagas" to round it out.
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@Gribnit said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@anonymous234 Needs "sagas" to round it out.
Here you go
Using Sagas as a Strategic View of Epics
Epics are used to get a bigger picture of user stories, but we need another level of abstraction. We need to bring together the various Epics that describe how our solution will evolve to its final endpoint, and how different functional teams and specialists will interact. This article by Ross Hall...
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@homoBalkanus because of course. Can I get "essays"? "tone poems"?
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@Gribnit said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@stillwater Sounds like a gamified form of SAFe which is shit.
I disagree, this seems much more free-form than anything SAFe leads to.
For maybe a year longer. Then it'll indeed be SAFe with funny names, as every company starts adopting it.
But honestly, structurally, this makes a great deal of sense.
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@blakeyrat said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@The_Quiet_One said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
What the actual fuck?
"Software development" includes programmers, UX experts, writers (if there's documentation), graphic artists (for your UI), etc.
If they're defining "developers" are "programmers", that's their OWN issue, not a universal one.
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@Magus said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
But honestly, structurally, this makes a great deal of sense.
Maybe, but only if a company truly commits to it. Which many are not capable of doing as they're risk averse enterprises.
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@stillwater said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@MrL Is it like roleplay but in a professional environment? Is everyone aware that someone took a joke too far and everyone has to play along?
It wasn't like in the article, company structure was rather normal. But the whole Agile/Scrum thing was retarded and harmful. Exhausting plannings with consideration about every stupid detail, writing childish 'stories' about every fucking button press, Jira wankery taking 20 minutes to save a simplest ticket, pointless scrum rituals without any consequences in real world.
And above all - never ending discussions about our Scrum quality. Are we Scrum enough? Do we use story points correctly? Was last retrospective ideally scrummy? Let's change this. Now let's change that. Let's go back to this thing from two months ago. On and on and on, ever changing irritating process mostly concerned about itself.
My estimation is that all this Scrum crap took over 25% of our time.
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@blakeyrat said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@The_Quiet_One said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
What the actual fuck?
"Software development" includes programmers, UX experts, writers (if there's documentation), graphic artists (for your UI), etc.
If they're defining "developers" are "programmers", that's their OWN issue, not a universal one.
I've always used "developers" and "programmers" as synonyms. That's why the "everybody on the team is a developer!" aspect of most agile practices drives me nuts. I appreciate the point being made, just don't try to re-purpose a really entrenched word.
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And despite all that, manglement praised how "agile" you were as a team?
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@MrL Yeah that's a common bad way to do it. Sounds like SAFe which is waterfall in agile terms.
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@AlexMedia said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
And despite all that, manglement praised how "agile" you were as a team?
We were so so agile as a whole company!!!!eleven!!!
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Honestly, the terms may be stupid, but the organizational structure they describe makes a lot of sense. Flat hierarchies and cross-team collaboration is encouraged.
This sounds a lot better than what I see at my employer. The teams here are mostly isolated and work against each other, willingly or unknowingly.
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@dfdub said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
Honestly, the terms may be stupid, but the organizational structure they describe makes a lot of sense. Flat hierarchies and cross-team collaboration is encouraged.
It can work, yes. But only if the entire company is committed to it, all the way from the top.
This sounds a lot better than what I see at my employer. The teams here are mostly isolated and work against each other, willingly or unknowingly.
That's a wholly different story, which needs fixing. But scrum/agile/squads/whatever aren't going to be a silver bullet as long as the underlying problem isn't tended to.
The "squads" model works for Spotify, because they want to work like that. They're ok with things breaking (as long as it gets fixed) and with trying new stuff. They're OK with teams self organising, as long as the teams are focused on the end result.
If you "work agile" (sprints! story points! burndown charts! retrospectives! silly team names!) but you still have to deal with a change management board, have to deal with budget approvals for tiny things (such as upscaling the size of your SQL Azure database) and have little input in what happens overal, you're not working agile. You're being fooled.
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@AlexMedia said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
It can work, yes. But only if the entire company is committed to it, all the way from the top.
I actually disagree on this. The whole point of the Agile manifesto was to explain what a team can do to be able to respond better. Usually, when you try to spread that, it goes fairly badly.
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@Magus Being committed doesn't mean that they have to embrace agile working as well. I can't see a financials department working in an agile way, for example.
What I mean with being committed is that the team has to be trusted to do things independently, without constant corporate oversight. That for example means trusting that the team delivers the expected output, but that it's up to the team to decide on the how and the when. It should be up to the team to govern their own budgets (within reasons), and it should be up to the team to make changes to its structure. Corp should have a hands-off approach.
And that's what many corporate overlords can't, because they're control freaks.
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This post is deleted!
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@Gribnit said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
Sounds like SAFe which is waterfall in agile terms.
SAFe is not supposed to be waterfall in agile terms. But our customer definitely does use it as such. Yes, to the point they have fixed plans for iterations and a bug-fixing buffer at the end. Of course when the project gets to the bug-fixing phase and finds the planned buffer is too short, it's too late to do something about it.
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@AlexMedia said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
If you "work agile" (sprints! story points! burndown charts! retrospectives! silly team names!) but you still have to deal with a change management board, have to deal with budget approvals for tiny things (such as upscaling the size of your SQL Azure database) and have little input in what happens overal, you're not working agile. You're being fooled.
All this agile stuff is just a box of tools¹ to continuously adjust plans to the reality. If you do, you are agile. Even if you do have change management board, because in some domains you simply need agreed and formally documented requirements². Even if you need budget approvals for small things as long as the approvals work smoothly³. If the process tells you those problems are on the horizon, the information propagates to the right people, and they act on it, it's agile. If you hit the problems like a wall and go into panic mode (regularly every other month), you are not.
¹ Back in my first job we had a lecture on agile. Back at the time (2005) XP was still in range. The lecturer commented it with something like: “The authors of XP say you need to take it all or nothing and everybody saying something else is selling something. Which is funny, because it's them who is trying to sell you something.”
² Of course if you have a change management board just so a bunch of seniors can wank their shirts, that disqualifies you from agile immediately. It also disqualifies you from agile if said change management board designs things down to class interfaces as that's none of their business.
³ If it takes six weeks to approve a $3 purchase, it obviously disqualifies you from agile as well. Been there, done that.
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You've hit the nail on the head when it comes to my gripes with enterprises pretending to be "agile" ;)
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@stillwater said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
I saw this
I thought it was a joke and he was making shit up.
Then I read this
http://www.full-stackagile.com/2016/02/14/team-organisation-squads-chapters-tribes-and-guilds/
Wow. What in the name of fuck?!
I think this is on us because instead of putting a stop to this we stood on the sidelines and laughed at it and then suddenly we're here. I hope this entire thing is satire like the OP from codingconfessional says.
This graphic:
Is also plainly inviting
levels of complaints about cultural appropriation and whatnot.
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@Bulb said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
If it takes six weeks to approve a $3 purchase, it obviously disqualifies you from agile as well. Been there, done that.
That fits the company here so perfectly. Claim to be moving to agile, and had to wait more than 2 months of red tape to replace a mouse.
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@Bulb "If you hit the problems like a wall and go into panic mode (regularly every other month), you are not."
Ah but what if we hit problems and add addressing them in the next sprint instead of panicking!?
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@AlexMedia said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
Being committed doesn't mean that they have to embrace agile working as well.
Being Committed means having some nice nurses put you in a jacket with very long sleeves and relocating you to a padded room. Adding in the need to embrace agile working would be unnecessarily cruel.
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@Weng said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@Bulb "If you hit the problems like a wall and go into panic mode (regularly every other month), you are not."
Ah but what if we hit problems and add addressing them in the next sprint instead of panicking!?
Depends on whether you actually manage address them in the next sprint and whether it is in time to avoid progress grinding to halt or causing other severe consequences.
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@MrL said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@stillwater said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@MrL Is it like roleplay but in a professional environment? Is everyone aware that someone took a joke too far and everyone has to play along?
It wasn't like in the article, company structure was rather normal. But the whole Agile/Scrum thing was retarded and harmful. Exhausting plannings with consideration about every stupid detail, writing childish 'stories' about every fucking button press, Jira wankery taking 20 minutes to save a simplest ticket, pointless scrum rituals without any consequences in real world.
And above all - never ending discussions about our Scrum quality. Are we Scrum enough? Do we use story points correctly? Was last retrospective ideally scrummy? Let's change this. Now let's change that. Let's go back to this thing from two months ago. On and on and on, ever changing irritating process mostly concerned about itself.
My estimation is that all this Scrum crap took over 25% of our time.
I figured I had to spend an average of seven hours a week in meetings. But it was actually worse than that, because 1) there's a cost to that level of interruption and 2) Since there was always a good chance that the people you needed to talk to were in meetings, it slowed things down further.
Since I wasn't one of the cool kids, almost all of the time I had to spend in the meetings was pointless, since there was little reason for me to say anything, and what was said was fiercely believed to be helpful rather than actually being helpful. The cool kids loved the endless meetings, because it meant that they had a captive audience for their endless words of great wisdom.
Once I got myself switched to the kanban team, it was a big improvement. One five - ten minute meeting a day seemed perfect, especially since I was allowed/expected to say my share.
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@tharpa said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
Once I got myself switched to the kanban team, it was a big improvement. One five - ten minute meeting a day seemed perfect, especially since I was allowed/expected to say my share.
I've been working in a Kanban like setting for the past couple of weeks, and it is very refreshing. Less time wasting, instead I'm just getting things done. Sadly that'll end soon and by then it will be scrum again. ;(
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@AlexMedia Our team was working in a very loose kanban style for a few months, then got pulled into SAFe. Within 9 months, they were in permanent panic mode, and proposed a new strategy to try to get back on track: They'd order work purely by priority and people could pick up whatever was at the top of the list, and everyone would focus on getting things across the board, and have less meetings. We muted ourselves and laughed, in despair and chagrin.
Now we're about half and half, and things are pretty good. We also don't have to work with any of the people from the SAFe project, so even better. If only our CTO hadn't said he wanted the whole company on SAFe when he was hired... but we can still hope no one listens to that.
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@Dreikin I want to join the middle group. I want to talk to that sassy mask-woman in the front center. I want to see behind the mask.
Fuck the other two sausage-fest groups.
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@blakeyrat said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@Dreikin I want to join the middle group. I want to talk to that sassy mask-woman in the front center. I want to see behind the mask.
Fuck the other two sausage-fest groups.
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@dkf said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@AlexMedia said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
Being committed doesn't mean that they have to embrace agile working as well.
Being Committed means having some nice nurses put you in a jacket with very long sleeves and relocating you to a padded room. Adding in the need to embrace agile working would be unnecessarily cruel.
But the long-sleeved jacket makes it difficult to agilely embrace the nice nurses. :(
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My God, those icons!
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On closer inspection I’m surprised they didn’t trigger the “Why are you posting screenshots of the Lounge?” dialog.
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I would have released this post in multiple parts.
1.0 Agile {post}
1.2 Tak{post}
1.3 ed{post}
1.31 en (bugfix){post}
1.4 toooo
1.41 oooooo
1.42a OOOOOOOO
1.42aRC1 oooooooooooooo
1.5 oooooooooo
2.0 (rewritten from scratch using a different font, typed with a non-QWERTY keyboard) Agile {post}
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@Lorne-Kates said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
I would have released this post in multiple parts.
1.0 Agile {post}
1.2 Tak{post}
1.3 ed{post}
1.31 en (bugfix){post}
1.4 toooo
1.41 oooooo
1.42a OOOOOOOO
1.42aRC1 oooooooooooooo
1.5 oooooooooo
2.0 (rewritten from scratch using a different font, typed with a non-QWERTY keyboard) Agile {post}
20 weeks later... (since we're only allowed to release at the end of the sprint)
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@Bulb hahaha
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@stillwater said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
@The_Quiet_One said in Agile taken tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo far:
stigma that a Development Team should only contain developers.
<
> It needs to contain women as well </ >
TFS Quotables - You ruined it and I'm leaving
