I honestly think that a lot of this “agile speak” has gotten too big for its britches.\u00a0 I’m seeing an interesting trend where management consultants who won’t work with small organizations are talking about scalable Agile.\u00a0 These people aren’t developers, probably never were, and are getting inside the build box and making things, well, krufty.<\/p>\n
So what do developers do?\u00a0 Parallel process of course!<\/p>\n
A parallel process happens when you are faced with an impossible reporting process usually called “Agile” that delivers zero value to your development effort.\u00a0 It’s for management only, and they think it helps but it doesn’t.\u00a0 You play the game, report in it — erstwhile the team has its actual <\/em>process going on.\u00a0 maybe on a local kanban board, or in free instance of pivotal tracker or a spreadsheet.\u00a0 its the idea that management (at times, not always) can be an impediment but a developer, without power, can do nothing to remove it.<\/p>\n I was pondering this today during a release.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We were being monitored by non-task people for status.\u00a0 Status.\u00a0 Such a strange notion, status.<\/p>\n It threw me back to this weird and uncool gig I had a few years back.\u00a0\u00a0 We had scattered teams and were doing scrums with call-in numbers.\u00a0 Sometimes, we would hear weird heavy breathing and would say “Hello” and no one would answer!\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Does ANYONE think that’s cool?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0\u00a0 Well then you have a problem.\u00a0 Most of us developers spend a lot of time building trust, accountability and transparency.\u00a0\u00a0 These aren’t qualities you take an online company CYA test for (i.e. compliance tests, data safety training etc.); they are internal things.\u00a0\u00a0 To be treated like that is just disrespectful, if not humorous.\u00a0 It definitely doesn’t garner trust with management.\u00a0 And it has a severe impact on teams.\u00a0\u00a0 When we gathered this info our reporting changed massively.\u00a0 Our scrums became — status — our reporting in Rally became — status.\u00a0\u00a0 And we made another process for ourselves on the side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I honestly think that a lot of this “agile speak” has gotten too big for its britches.\u00a0 I’m seeing an interesting trend where management consultants who won’t work with small organizations are talking about scalable Agile.\u00a0 These people aren’t developers, probably never were, and are getting inside the build box and making things, well, krufty. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}