I don’t blame agile. But I do kind of blame Agile™. Now, more than ever, you’re likely to be in an Agile™ environment in which you get overloaded with tasks. Should you focus on improving the quality of the feature you’re working on? Or should you get on to the other 17 tasks you have this sprint?
Nothing about Agile means doing more tasks. Agile means “inspect and adapt” — regularly look at the work done and change course if the current environment favors a course different than when you started.
And they don’t explain what Agile™️ even means, but I can tell you that in twenty+ years of experience there’s just as much rush to get things done now as there ever was.
Agile (and its poster child, Scrum) is infinitely preferable to waterfall. Having the product always in a ready to ship state reduces so much risk and lets you reconsider early design decisions and find out which requirements are actually necessary.
Even waterfall adherents were already doing Agile — they just called it “sustaining” and waited until the product was released to start doing it. Extend that style of project management to the earliest phase of development and that’s Agile.
You’re describing what agile should be, but Agile™ is the variant you get in toxic companies where they say they are agile, but it’s just a mechanism to micromanage developers with bad managers asking why you’re not burning down enough points or why you haven’t met the estimated date you thought before you realized there was more technical debt than a bankrupt business.
Maybe you’ve avoided it but I’ve seen it first hand.
The author seems pretty stupid.
Nothing about Agile means doing more tasks. Agile means “inspect and adapt” — regularly look at the work done and change course if the current environment favors a course different than when you started.
And they don’t explain what Agile™️ even means, but I can tell you that in twenty+ years of experience there’s just as much rush to get things done now as there ever was.
Agile (and its poster child, Scrum) is infinitely preferable to waterfall. Having the product always in a ready to ship state reduces so much risk and lets you reconsider early design decisions and find out which requirements are actually necessary.
Even waterfall adherents were already doing Agile — they just called it “sustaining” and waited until the product was released to start doing it. Extend that style of project management to the earliest phase of development and that’s Agile.
You’re describing what agile should be, but Agile™ is the variant you get in toxic companies where they say they are agile, but it’s just a mechanism to micromanage developers with bad managers asking why you’re not burning down enough points or why you haven’t met the estimated date you thought before you realized there was more technical debt than a bankrupt business.
Maybe you’ve avoided it but I’ve seen it first hand.
As I said, that’s nothing new and not particular to Agile.
There are mangers who think LEAN means they can lay everyone off.
Businesspeak has always been used to bamboozle frontline employees and abuse them. Stealing terminology for that from project management isn’t new.