Agile Heavy Breathing
I honestly think that a lot of this “agile speak” has gotten too big for its britches. I’m seeing an interesting trend where management consultants who won’t work with small organizations are talking about scalable Agile. These people aren’t developers, probably never were, and are getting inside the build box and making things, well, krufty.
So what do developers do? Parallel process of course!
A parallel process happens when you are faced with an impossible reporting process usually called “Agile” that delivers zero value to your development effort. It’s for management only, and they think it helps but it doesn’t. You play the game, report in it — erstwhile the team has its actual process going on. maybe on a local kanban board, or in free instance of pivotal tracker or a spreadsheet. its the idea that management (at times, not always) can be an impediment but a developer, without power, can do nothing to remove it.
I was pondering this today during a release. At the end of our successful release on four new sites (and a scary incident with an old CMS that likes to freak out) everyone started hanging up and people I DID NOT KNOW where on the phone had their names checked off by the automated phone meeting voice. We were being monitored by non-task people for status. Status. Such a strange notion, status.
It threw me back to this weird and uncool gig I had a few years back. We had scattered teams and were doing scrums with call-in numbers. Sometimes, we would hear weird heavy breathing and would say “Hello” and no one would answer! Later we found out the director and the PM’s would call in to monitor our scrums on our phone line, but we weren’t supposed to know.
Does ANYONE think that’s cool? Really? Well then you have a problem. Most of us developers spend a lot of time building trust, accountability and transparency. These aren’t qualities you take an online company CYA test for (i.e. compliance tests, data safety training etc.); they are internal things. To be treated like that is just disrespectful, if not humorous. It definitely doesn’t garner trust with management. And it has a severe impact on teams. When we gathered this info our reporting changed massively. Our scrums became — status — our reporting in Rally became — status. And we made another process for ourselves on the side.