Thread by @TheGoodKnowmad

Key reflections from this great Article: The Agile Crisis

blog.usejournal.com/the-agile-cris…

Thread.

1/ What some people lack in experience and professional discipline they are willing to make up in effort, willing to working ‘crazy hours’.

2/ You can be hyper-focused, but sometimes on the wrong things.

3/ An efficient business discipline coupled to an undisciplined engineering team will very rapidly make a mess.

4/ The Agile movement tried to identify common patterns applied in software development, which actually worked. And it looked into the greatest common factors as guidance and how the values linking them together relate.

5/ According to Martin Fowler Agile has become mainstream and (...) a growing number of people, including prominent signatories of the original Agile Manifesto are dissatisfied with the state of affairs.

6/ Agile values have been corrupted mostly for three reasons:

1. Agile-industrial complex: briefly trains people, provides shiny few-day-certificates

2. Focus on methodology at the cost of the lack of technical excellence

3. Deadline and finishing of the project is prized.

7/ The agile movement was overtaken by project managers who misunderstood it as a new methodology for managing software projects and not caring much about the guiding values it was founded upon.

8/ Agile Split: Practitioners of Software Craftsmanship following Technical Practices versus project managers pushing forward Business Practices. Which led to the Programmers fleeing from Agile.

9/ Flacid agile is just a half-hearted attempt following a few proven practices.

“We have large swaths of people doing “flacid agile”, a half-hearted attempt at following a few selected software development practices, poorly”
— Andy Hunt

10/ “An Agile team will be Agile no matter how the project is managed. On the other hand, a team that is not Agile will not become Agile simply by virtue of a new and fancy project management strategy.”
— Robert “Uncle Bob” C. Martin

11/ There are members of the Agile Industry telling us we are just ‘doing it wrong’. And then there is the HR department of our next job, expecting you to have experience in working agile and to love doing so.

12/ Ron Jeffries article on Dark Scrum realizes that Scrum regularly oppresses developers and describes the negative dynamics which typically unfold during the Sprint Cycle.

13/ Instead of methods (such as Scrum) Jeffries also points us to the practices which should be used:

14/ Ron realizes that there is an imbalance of power between developers and power holders. Good software can only be delivered when the team follows their professional practices.

15/ “Keep these people’s [the power holders] nose to the grindstone and their feet to the fire. That has always been what it takes to get software done. Scrum doesn’t change that.”
-Ron Jeffries-

16/ A lot of companies are to some degree self-aware they are *not* doing real Agile, and will rather sell you something like: Well, we are “kind of scrumish”, we do “agile but not real agile”, we do “something like ‘Scrumban”. But what is the point of telling us that?

17/ The last barrier defending Agile usually is the mythical waterfall. As soon as somebody criticizes Agile this person usually is reminded that at least ist better than the old waterfall model of software development.

18/ One striking symptom of the Agile Crisis is the impositions of Agile on teams, which seems to be a common practice today. If Agile is so great and really gives more power and autonomy to the developers, why is it commonly imposed by upper management?

19/ The Agile Movement has been over-idealized. In part due to the original protagonist which were enthusiastic about the Agile Values. This enthusiasm was amplified by the Agile Industrial Complex, which quickly grew into a business.

20/ At the end of the day, agile it is more driven by the quest for efficiency than by values.

21/ Agile seems to have reached a plateau: the split between management and software workers seems to continue.

22/ Some problems of Agile might be due to a poor understanding of some practitioners and disregarding its values.

23/ Agile started as kind of (project) management crisis and management still seems to be a hard problem in IT.

24/ Trust is the basis for any good communication. But Trust cannot be demanded. It needs to be earned. This Problem is highly related to Agile as trust is essential for any Agile team. But it can never be imposed.

25/ Scrum, is more about efficiency than about empowering developers and it is not a shift away from Taylorism. On closer inspection, this will be visible in every single conflict within companies trying to transform towards Agile.

26/ The humane promise of Agile is broken: it makes people more replaceable and controllable and is a modern and competitive form of Management.