Agile Crisis
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@izzion said in Agile Crisis:
This issue becomes especially pressing when one considers that contemporary software is likely to involve things like machine learning, large datasets, or artificial intelligence—technologies that have shown themselves to be potentially destructive, particularly for minoritized people.
It really isn't everywhere. There is TONS of contemporary software that doesn't touch on any of that (depending on how you classify large datasets I suppose).
The Agile Manifesto paints an alluring picture of workplace democracy. The problem is, it’s almost always implemented in workplaces devoted to the bottom line, not to workers’ well-being.
The worker is not an automaton. You, as the employee, have agency and if your work environment is not amenable either find a new job or work on changing that one. If you are being exploited by your boss the problem is you.
Sometimes those priorities align; the manifesto makes a strong case that businesses’ products can be strengthened by worker autonomy. But they’re just as likely to conflict, as when a project manager is caught between a promise to a client and the developers’ own priorities.
A proper project manager sets reasonable expectations with both the developers and the customers so that these conflicts are few and far between. My last job had a pretty blanket, 10-60-30 rule (10% of your time was free to work on any task you wanted, 60% was on planned tasks and 30% was for the unexpected) per sprint. This could change per sprint if there were sufficient reason to do so.
If you are constantly running into conflicts, is it the model that is wrong or the people running it?
Some people I talked to pointed out that Agile has the potential to foster solidarity among workers. If teams truly self-organize, share concerns, and speak openly, perhaps Agile could actually lend itself to worker organization. Maybe management, through Agile, is producing its own gravediggers.
Those people are idiots and so are you if you think that you can get rid of the manager. Having a team that communicates freely and openly is the ideal, but that doesn't remove the need to have someone head the group. You can find plenty of groups who have tried to fnd clever ways around this problem, but all of them fail. So no, Agile will not lead to the death of the manager.
Part of the issue is Agile’s flexibility. Jan Wischweh, a freelance developer, calls this the “no true Scotsman” problem. Any Agile practice someone doesn’t like is not Agile at all, it inevitably turns out.
Perhaps your problem is you are looking at Agile is a strict structure (because that is all that you know) rather than what it is truly designed to be. Which, at the end of the day, is a system that allows for the various people involved with a project to interact in a more open way.
Perhaps, and bare with me here, if you focused on the concepts behind Agile and forgot about all of the "only this process is agile BS" you might find that the process is yours to define as long as the end goal is achieved?
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@Groaner said in Agile Crisis:
@Jaime said in Agile Crisis:
@DogsB said in Agile Crisis:
For example, Ken Schwaber [a manifesto author] was vocal and explicit about his goal to get rid of all project managers.
No. You need someone to run interference with the rest of the company to buy time for a solution.
The last huge company I worked for seemed to understand how to use Project Managers. Their job was to know the corporate bureaucracy and force the project to follow the rules.
Good project managers are like SSDs and vehicle backup cameras - you don't know how much you need them until you experience them.
I've had experience with one really good PM.
Bonuses for engineers were based on hitting certain quarterly goals and milestones. He really understood the
PM system, and twisted it as much as he could to benefit us. Things like, pushing out a goal to next quarter, because we already had the maximum bonus we could get this quarter, and pushing it out would give us an easy-to-achieve goal as a buffer against unexpected problems hitting the real goals next quarter — and there were always unexpected problems. So that goal was almost but not quite done on the last day of the quarter and finished on the first day of the next quarter. He'd figure out which ones we actually needed to finish and which didn't really matter, so we could get the best possible bonuses without impacting the overall schedule. There's an old Lounge thread that goes into more detail, especially about the 
bonus system.
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Pfft, no fun.
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@Dragoon said in Agile Crisis:
If you are being exploited by your boss the problem is you.
Sometimes it is your boss that you really should blame. And sometimes it is yourself.
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@dkf said in Agile Crisis:
@Dragoon said in Agile Crisis:
If you are being exploited by your boss the problem is you.
Sometimes it is your boss that you really should blame. And sometimes it is yourself.
Bosses are innocent, holy creatures.
