I have been privileged to work in a company that really thought about and worked to prioritize the four values on the left. I would follow those agile coaches to any place they wanted. I have been a staunch defender in real life and online, because I've seen it work very well. I also have been on teams with other processes and seen how much worse it can be.
I will take the values of agile and push for those, and I'll take the lessons learned such as quick feedback loops, continuous integration, relative estimation, automated tests (which came from people like Kent Beck and Robert Martin pushing them so hard alongside agile), and the good stuff.
However, after seeing how badly it can be weaponized against developers, I'm certainly ready to throw out the bathwater, and I think this is what they're talking about. I've seen far too much cargo cult agile and far too much command and control with a light layer of SCRUM.
We have agile "coaches" who have never learned to code! They take a set of color-by-number technical practices but don't understand how or why they matter! I had to correct someone's slide that got the four values wrong, and their consulting group apparently had been copying and pasting them incorrectly from presentation to presentation!
The values and principles of agile are great. The current implementation has some serious debt.
(And while we're at it, we could update it. Too many people misunderstood the documentation part. Continuous attention to technical excellence needs to be upgraded to a value. Delivering frequently today means days instead of weeks.)
> However, after seeing how badly it can be weaponized against developers, I'm certainly ready to throw out the bathwater, and I think this is what they're talking about.
Poor management is a separate issue from agile. Even so, I would rather stay on a poorly managed agile shop than go back to a waterfall shop.
As far as the "values on the left", I like to explain them as a 55/45 split (and adjustable depending on your reality): we still deal with processes and tools, we just take a second to think whether a process is actually needed when we can just talk to someone instead.
Example: on a small team, you might just ask "can someone please approve my changes?" instead of having a whole jira workflow with code reviews and approvals.
The alternative is always Doing What Works. Alot of Agile is superfluous Waste. With time it'll only grow more added layers of inefficiencies. The true costs and risks always get hidden away.
I have been privileged to work in a company that really thought about and worked to prioritize the four values on the left. I would follow those agile coaches to any place they wanted. I have been a staunch defender in real life and online, because I've seen it work very well. I also have been on teams with other processes and seen how much worse it can be.
I will take the values of agile and push for those, and I'll take the lessons learned such as quick feedback loops, continuous integration, relative estimation, automated tests (which came from people like Kent Beck and Robert Martin pushing them so hard alongside agile), and the good stuff.
However, after seeing how badly it can be weaponized against developers, I'm certainly ready to throw out the bathwater, and I think this is what they're talking about. I've seen far too much cargo cult agile and far too much command and control with a light layer of SCRUM.
We have agile "coaches" who have never learned to code! They take a set of color-by-number technical practices but don't understand how or why they matter! I had to correct someone's slide that got the four values wrong, and their consulting group apparently had been copying and pasting them incorrectly from presentation to presentation!
The values and principles of agile are great. The current implementation has some serious debt.
(And while we're at it, we could update it. Too many people misunderstood the documentation part. Continuous attention to technical excellence needs to be upgraded to a value. Delivering frequently today means days instead of weeks.)