Agileisdead.com

I can hear the naysayers now: “Agile does allow for flexibility!”

I agree that there is some flexibility within Agile (e.g. Scrum/Kanban), but in my experience it’s usually as flexible as the menu at In-N-Out burger. There are some choices, and perhaps more if you know the secret menu items, but overall, it does not offer a lot of flexibility.

Typically, there a lots of process ‘defaults’ that always seem to fall into place; and, worse yet, they are implemented without examination or questioning. These default processes are typically imposed by the Product Owner, Product Manager, Engineering Manager or Scrum Master.

How often have you witnessed a Manager stop and ask the dev team ‘should we adjust our processes in anyway?’, ‘would you like to do stand-ups differently?’, ‘should find a different approach than our typical planning meeting?’

Rarely, if ever, I bet.

The Mt. Everest-sized irony here is that the word ‘agile’ implies nimbleness – light-footed – while Agile is typically presented with an authoritarian sensibility – as if its processes were etched in stone tablets brought down from the mount.

This is not to say that any of this nefarious or evil on the part of the Manager. I don’t think it is. I think a lot of the problem boils down to two things:

(1) a lack of respect for the dev team: not treating them as adults who may varying preferences
(2) a complete lack of creativity when it comes to alternate ways of doing things differently than the Agile way.

How can we fix that?