As a developer who has been quite unhappy in Agile environments, I don't actually think Agile is to blame, which the article alludes to.
I think the issue with Agile is that software is a field in which is difficult to measure productivity easily. Then Agile comes along and offers the appearance of making it easy to score and and measure team and individual effectiveness. Sure it's "supposed" to be for the team to measure their own effectiveness and empower people to work more productively, but for folks in management roles, the opportunity to 'score' engineers based on Agile metrics is too attractive.
Once it becomes just a way to figure out who's not moving fast enough, or "failing to meet their commitments", of course people will hate it. It gets changed from a tool into a stick.
-- Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools
-- Value working software over comprehensive documentation
-- Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation
-- Value responding to change over following a plan
That doesn't sound like "agile" anywhere I've seen it implemented. The issue is that you need real buy-in from all levels of the company for any process. I've always said that a "bad" process executed consistency and with real buy-in will outperform any "good" process with only lip service commitment.
You know the problem with those principles? They are not a methodology.
Most of the problem described in the article -and everywhere- is precisely that "the theory is good but everybody is doing it wrong".
But that doesn't really help, because it overlooks the fact that the origin of all this is just a pile of generic, hard-to-argue small-time guru ruminations. I mean, it is not necessarily bad advice: "These are valuable things and we think that in particular these ones are more valuable than those other ones". Okay. Probably. They do look good. Let's say they are. Now what? Oh, that's left as an exercise to the reader.
It's funny. Just yesterday I almost had an argument over one of these things. I heard Karen say to the guy on my left that "Agile means less documentation", so I raised my eyebrow. "Agile means less defined documentation, more open, because documentation has no value at all" - she added. I was about to point out that that is not at all what it means, but then she went further and told him that what he needed to do was to "work as a team and become more involved in collaboration". That, right there, is the problem: pretending a bunch of cool sounding expressions can be a substitute for actual things like writing down what they wanted the guy to do.
It seems like the problem might be that people assume agile software development is, in and of itself, supposed to be a methodology. As I understand it, agile software development is meant to be a set of principles describing any methodology that serves those principles. As such, Extreme Programming is an agile methodology, intended to serve those principles when employed well, and Scrum is a pseudo-agile methodology that serves as the halfway point to which one might be able to drag management, but more often ends up being an excuse to measure developer productivity in story points.
There's value in enumerating important principles for consistently pursuing quality work product. That's why the Agile Manifesto has value. The manifesto is just a manifesto, a statement of intent and principle, and not a methodology in and of itself. One doesn't need a published, monetized methodology to engage in agile software development. One simply needs a methodology -- whether unique to one's project, or widely known -- that reinforces those principles to engage in agile software development.
The biggest problem with agile software development as a concept is that it, like any other elaboration of any principles of quality work, is that most people will fail to see the forest for the trees, will marry themselves to some well-marketed thing that pretends to be about principles, and will end up largely doing the same dumb crap they've always done.
The documentation one is the one that completely throws me for a loop, and why I will never be on-board with anything claiming to be Agile. You know what? sometimes the documentation is more important than the working code. We're not all building crappy web properties as an agency, sometimes we are building stuff that is supposed to last longer than any one developer's career.
Sometimes just documenting what the thing is supposed to do and why would solve so many issues, but since people have gotten hooked on capital-A Agile so much has gone by the wayside, or been delegated to non-technical roles.
> You know the problem with those principles? They are not a methodology.
No, that's not the problem with the five values and twelve principles.
In fact, the problem is the desire to have a single, divinely ordained methodology (which both the first value and twelfth principle reject, and that rejection is arguably the central basis of Agile.)
OTOH, while it is good that the Manifesto and Principles don't ordain a methodology a it's bad that they are written in a way which makes it harder to extract actionable direction than is necessary.
The only place I've worked where Agile was like this was, surprisingly, one of New Zealand's major banks. The buy-in for Agile started at the executive level, and they made a call that everything was Agile. Obviously, this would've been an absolute mess for most teams. But my team functioned perfectly. The woman who was our scrum master was originally a project manager in the bank. But with the Agile reshuffle she went over-the-top with her retraining. This was horrible in some areas, where she would follow processes to a T, but she would catch herself, and recognise the importance of those principles. She grew into the role well, and the team was eventually working great!
As a developer become engineering manager become director of product, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
But I think the bigger problem is that often developers and management (at all levels) give very little thought into "delivering value" and a lot of thought into "doing whatever they want".
I can't fault individuals (workers, management, or executives) for trying to do what's best for their careers rather than what's best for the company. As a manager, I think management's primary objectives are to set up their reports for success and to figure out how to align their reports' incentives with the company's incentives in the best possible way.
Management, I have seen, often does a terrible job 1) actually knowing what "value" is, 2) figuring out how to measure that they're actually delivering value, and 3) figuring out how to align delivering value with the worker's own incentives.
If you can't do these things, you have NO chance to do agile effectively. It's easy to go through the motions of Agile, but you will gain nothing if you can't define and measure value (and hardly any companies can -- it's not easy!)
But as you pointed out, even if you can accomplish the prerequisites, it's still INCREDIBLY difficult to attribute an engineer to value. You can execute effectively, but be on a project that turned out to be useless. Making the button green might be easy, but because of previous technical debt, making it blue might be really hard, etc...
Here some reasons I have seen why nobody has a clue about value...
* Often the financials of a company are "need to know" or obfuscated (Y-Axis unannotated)...
* The financials are regarded as irrelevant to engineering (by management, finance AND engineering)
* The estimates of where the value lies is often just a spreadsheet sucked out of the thumb of somebody in marketing who already has a eye on his next job.
* Nobody _ever_ goes back and closes the loop and evaluate the value estimations and the value estimation process, so the company never learns to do better.
* Let a drooling slob of an engineer talk to a customer? You're joking Right?
And yet engineer is all about tradeoffs, we make several per day under the illusion we know which are wise....
TBH I think it's normal for any person to put their own interest on first priority. The key is to hire people who actually share the same interests. I fully agree with your point actually.
I worked in fake agile for a few years. It took me a while to place my finger on why I never really loved everything about it, but I eventually decided that it felt like it was a façade to a management power grab. It gave the ability to micro manage workers to those who don’t understand the problems or even the product. If agile is necessary to be productive then you already have too many people involved. If it isn’t necessary then it introduces a lot of overhead for a little bit of book keeping (which isn’t inherently bad).
I remember a time I worked with a team not using the agile process.
We were agile.
When I worked in teams following the agile process, we were rigid.
Agile shouldn't be a process, mgt see it as such. It becomes a process. Clever engineers hate poorly thought out processes. Agile as a process is a contradiction in itself.
Agile is no process. Let the team find their ways and iterate as often as possible, along with a few other proven principles.
Points becomes estimates for managers, they will see it as such and build huge waterfall projects documents to track everthing, and they will pressure teams to deliver shitty software when they feel the stories are sand bagged.
I think that's pretty close to the truth. Like the Tao, you can point at instances of it, i.e., you can point to a particular team and the processes it is today using, and that is agile. But it is not Agile. On this same team I'm on, I've used different process a year ago, and two years ago, and now, and almost certainly in a year and two years. Those specific processes aren't Agile... but they were each agile, because we're constantly re-evaluating how we're working and what we're doing, and tuning our processes to match the environment we're in. If you take my agile process and just blindly apply it to your team, regardless of what that process is, that's not Agile. The grass of the field does not become a bird by shaping itself into wings.
It's the burgerization of software development, where every engineer can be turned into a generic fungible burger-flipping engineering unit, and the output measured in the number of burgers flipped.
The software architecture is falling apart, the tech debt overshadows the actual debt of a small country, our subject matter expert quit the company over being micromanaged, and the clients are abandoning our buggy software for our competitors? What went wrong, we closed all of those JIRA tickets, surely that must be good for something.
I’ll add this — To a large extent, many management systems are about reducing the failure modes — but I don’t see why a system must downplay creativity and deep thinking about the core business engine (often the software).
Ticket driven development isn't just an agile issue though. Project management has always loved granular tasks and the assumption that at some point they are all worth the same effort.
It took me a while to place my finger on why I never really loved everything about it, but I eventually decided that it felt like it was a façade to a management power grab.
Yup that's exactly it. Or to put it more delicately (than simply a "power grab"): a façade that servers various ulterior purposes -- from making their company seem hip and modern (to the uninformed) to simply being able to say "finally we have some structure!" even though it's very debatable whether new "structure" really brings the benefits that it claims to (and evidently brings many negatives on board with it).
I'll bite. Management always seem to get the crap. To summarize, if engineers knew how to manage things better than management, why don't they? From my experience, teams without management seem to complain about that and end up with bad results. There are more factors at play, and honestly it's very rare that the engineers sees that (or even acknowledge that they don't know all the relevant factors, with all the implications that gives).
Of course, just as with engineers, there are good and bad managers. But it seems pointless to always complain about management being the ones screwing it up all the time.
A space alien with a raygun and a watch knows just enough English to tell you to build a time machine "or else!"
Any attempt to persuade him otherwise just results in him pointing his raygun to his watch. Either he's ignorant, can't or won't understand, or simply doesn't care.
Software management in 2019 is still very much like this. Management has had 40 years to solve this problem, and it looks like it won't be solved in the next 40 either
Management gets the crap because they have the responsibility and push the processes.
It’s as if we were complaining that elected officials get the crap for mismanaging the country. Well, that’s the point of them doing their job. Our goal is not to all become managers (though some do, exactly for these reasons), it shouldn’t be a ”why don’t you do it ?” rhetoric.
Yeah I don't mean to imply that it's managers per se. Management seems suuuuper hard and I wouldn't want the task of assessing engineering productivity.
I just mean that the "metrics" put out by Agile give the illusion of something useful to managers. It's totally understandable that folks in positions of authority would attempt to make use of them. But I think the illusion of objectivity is more damaging to teams than the acceptance of uncertainty.
I'd say that attempting to use the same tool to help a team communicate with one another and to communicate with management or stakeholders who aren't very close to the project (involved daily near the ground level) is essentially doomed. Management will either hate the answers they get or they'll ruin the tool's utility to the team, resulting in worse communication at every level and slower work. Or both.
It's where I think Jira and other do-everything tools that try to be useful to both ICs and management fall down hard, every time I've seen them used. Management wants to see their burndown charts and such. They want projections out months on minimal data. They want to see the performance of people, not teams. Points become BS because everyone knows they're being watched. Totals are missed the first few sprints (of course they are, you're still calibrating WTF a point means for this team and this project!) and management gets pissy, exerts more control, implies ICs are failing at their job, project goes downhill from there. But look, we're Doing Agile! Such professionals we are.
As a project manager, I hate taking a bug tracker and trying to beat it into being a project management/communication/measurement tool. The only reason I always end up doing so is that bug trackers are already in the engineers’ daily workflow so they are usually the source of truth about the project.
I’d love it if developers would be willing to collaborate using a dedicated project management tool and leave the bug tracker for bugs, but the chances of that happening voluntarily are nil. You gotta go where everyone else already is.
> I’d love it if developers would be willing to collaborate using a dedicated project management tool and leave the bug tracker for bugs, but the chances of that happening voluntarily are nil. You gotta go where everyone else already is.
What'd that look like, that's different from what they do now? Trying to imagine what developer input to that would look like. I think a lot of devs already feel like existing PM tools they use for sprint tracking and such are worse than if they pushed more planning into git or somewhere otherwise closer to the code, so getting buy-in might not be so hard if devs got to be a little less heavy in a bunch of not-actually-that-useful-to-them tools on a day to day basis.
Could be something as complex as MS Project or simple as a shared spreadsheet with rows for each project and columns for each milestone or for things like ETA, dependencies we’re blocked on, escalations needed, scope changes, etc. Not sure how that could gel well with a source control tool but I’m all ears!
I think 1/4 of the challenge is what tool to use and 3/4 is convincing and motivating people to be reliable and forthcoming with accurate information. A good project manager demonstrates he or she can add value, unblock things, escalate and communicate appropriately, and not just be the Project Police.
By using things like story points and other metrics intended to be internal to the team, developers have a lot of incentive to not lie on their estimates. On the other hand, management has incentive to push things to be finished quicker.
By letting management having access to those metrics, they're automatically at a disadvantage when negotiating timelines and priorities.
Management has, culturally, become very metrics-oriented. This is the root of the problem under discussion here. See Goodhart's law for a brief statement of why this can't work.
Almost every time I bring this up somewhere, someone pops up to say that metrics are important, key to fair and impersonal management. Without it, everything would suck, and managers couldn't do anything. The problem with that thinking is two-fold:
1. It ignores the fact that, as soon as there's a metric that determines someone's rewards and punishments in a management system (whether it's governmental regulation, corporate middle-management, anarcho-communistic self-management, or anything else), the system of measurement will get gamed, and the most overtly "successful" will end up being the most cleverly sociopathic about it.
2. There is an alternative to strictly quantitative evaluation. The alternative is qualitative evaluation. This requires good judgement, intimate knowledge of the problem domain, good intentions, and the ability to consider context, among other things. Sadly, this is incompatible with bureaucracy, which means you need to either carve a bureaucracy-free zone out of the larger organization to manage a team well or stay out of medium-to-large corporations (and out of small businesses that ape the behaviors of large bureaucracies).
Managers who insist on doing everything quantitatively (and sometimes they're forced to do so by their managers) will not get good results. "Good" is qualitative, not quantitative. Equating "good" with metrics just gives you results that look "good" on paper, but really aren't good.
Probably the biggest benefit of a small organization is the ability to eschew managerial bureaucracy in practice.
> if engineers knew how to manage things better than management, why don't they?
They do: engineering-led companies are often dynamic success stories, then when they get big enough traditional management works down from the top to lower levels and the firm stagnates.
Agile was proposed as a way for engineers (or "self-organizing teams") to manage things better. The complaint is that the engineers' better management process has now been hijacked by management and turned into something else.
Somewhere, there's always an impedance mismatch. Agile can be managed, and managed well - I've seen it done - but above that manager, there's another manager. Somewhere up the chain, someone wants to see progress on a PERT chart or similar, and the person who is managing an agile project doesn't have a good way to answer.
It is vital to have someone close enough to the project that the team trusts them to see their honest opinions about progress and blockers, including non-bullshit pointing of tasks, who is the point person for communicating progress to management, and who is capable of producing reports that are technically bullshit in an is-this-quantifiable-this-way sense but actually do reflect reality usefully to managers. Someone who does that well is worth All The Money.
They're useless if you're giving management direct access to team planning & communication tools, of course.
In some places these are called Engineering Project Managers, in others they are Technical Program Managers. You may think they are worth All The Money but let me assure you they usually make far, far less than the developers :-)
The failing after every step has been when they close the loop. That is, agile is used to score and measure velocity. This velocity is then used to impact future scoring. This nullifies Agile's use for measurement since management is now insisting that x number of points be completed per developer per sprint.
The places I've had it succeed greatly have all been new development. We consistently scored stories. Product owners could then had a budget equal to the team's velocity to purchase from the backlog into the next sprint. What it really looked like was they got to arrange the order that the backlog would be picked up and how much would get done in a sprint was an estimate, but with consistent implementation it became eerily accurate over time. It has been my observation that it takes about 6 sprints to calibrate -- where the team scores consistently and the variances from sprints cancel out.
Another point of emphasis is that velocity is a team score. Every failing effort I've been involved with used it to score individuals which inevitably ends up in scoring the stories higher so that an individual gets more points. It also results in cherry-picking easy points and ignoring tasks and bug fixes which may result in zero. It also (like bug fixes) results in everything being assigned points such that points become a proxy for time. If you're developing a new system and you have a bug fix, the team has already claimed the points for that bug fix. You should not make more points for the bug fix, your velocity should actually go down, giving a more accurate estimate in the future of how much new system is actually produced and not a measure of how much a programmer has worked.
So, measurements should absolutely be available to management. But they shouldn't be used to impact future scoring.
That assumes really good (measured against the norm) management. If your management is "normal" (or worse), giving management access to that just destroys the whole value of the scoring system. (Always remember that fifty percent is worse than the centerline, to say nothing of the still-within-a-standard-deviation "better" that isn't enough better to matter.)
It really sounds like a "not true Scotsman" argument, but I've had Agile fail when the team failed to use Agile. As I wrote above, points inevitably became a proxy for time in one manner or another. Production was pinned to a certain number of points (say 15 per developer per sprint).
I can't throw it all on management either. People who should know better will accept 2 days worth of points for conducting training or attending a workshop.
Largely, though, I would say it's a simple matter of not understanding how Agile works at all. It has just become, "you score points for doing stuff" (in proportion to time, but it's not time, but it is).
Your observation is right on target, and it has been predicted and validated [0]. The people who originally developed agile understood this, but it's one of the kinds of things that doesn't really sink in in many cases.
[0] 'Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations', Robert Austin, Dorset House, 1996.
But who ensures it isn't? Management who are the ones inherently attracted to having the metric to use? The ones who are able to withstand that pressure and not touch the information are likely the ones would could see the information without using it as a stick.
I guess upper management could enforce the separation on a level lower management could not override, but I would assume such cases are rare.
The solution is to stop blaming the methodology for the failures of management, and just accept that bureaucracy breeds mediocrity. Corporations grow into bureaucracy, inevitably. Choose accordingly when evaluating potential employers. Keep this in mind when running a business.
I am not sure it would even save the situation. Most agile methodologies assume a lot of constants to allow measurements to have any sense at all (for instance scrum assumes teams members are stable, of that knowledge over their work perimeter is good, etc.)
We work in a field where inherently there are unknows, and measuring the unknown is not gonna be that useful, however we turn it.
I was in a company that did Agile well (my first time using it). Team velocity was never used to measure the output of the team, only to better predict how much work we could fit in a sprint. The other big think was that they saw Agile as a framework, each team was free to do a different "implementation" and use different tools. Team velociyy had different units in different team and couldn't be compared.
I worked for an employer that had a different PROCESS.md document in every project repository. At every retrospective, we'd evaluate the process for that project to determine whether it needed updating. It was awesome.
Eventually, things changed, but for a while there it was awesome. Things got done well, in reasonable amounts of time, with a lot of attention to quality work.
I think the beginning of the end was probably around the time when the company (a software development consultancy) started using fine-grained hourly measures of time pre-sold to clients. This started happening around the time investors in certain clients got more involved in trying to dictate company policy, and I'm pretty sure it was all part of an attempt by investors to ensure there were "better metrics" for evaluating their investments.
You can't measure something without it directly affecting the measured thing's state. In this case, it started having detrimental effects on almost everything. Previously happy and productive devs started burning out, mediocre devs became new management favorites, more bugs got into production, projects suffered under less and less reasonable goals (including at one point my task effectively being to solve one of the Hard Problems of software dev -- cache invalidation), and so on.
In the US, management culture seems to have a monomaniacal focus on metrics. (I'd say "simplistic metrics", but the way they use them guarantees they're always simplistic.) This is driven, in part, by bureaucratization, which is in turn driven by a bunch of other things (mostly stemming from politics, directly or indirectly) in our business culture. Many managers would complain that without metrics they can't evaluate team productivity, individual value to the organization, and other important stuff, and they're right. The solution is not to double down on those metrics obsessions, though; it's to replace those managers with managers who are capable of effective, qualitative evaluation, instead of the almost purely quantitative approach that holds the high ground.
> for folks in management roles, the opportunity to 'score' engineers based on Agile metrics is too attractive.
One nice thing about this is that the metric is visible. Then you can optimise your performance against it. Is this necessarily productive, or in the real interests of the company? Maybe, maybe not. But I look at this as a kind of a favour: if your boss is complaining "velocity is too low" well, at least you know what you're being measured by. Put some extra points on those stories. Undercommit. Make your boss happy and get them off your back. You'll be doing the same work either way.
But IMO agile is not at all about measuring productivity, I'm not sure how you'd come to that conclusion?
There is, I admit, an element of it in the sprint planning, but that is only meant to be a tool to figure out how much work can be put into the next sprint. Agile does not care what your absolute value of velocity is.
If however, some misinformed PM is obsessing over velocity then I think that is a very different issues and not really related to the essence of agile.
But using agile does change how developers communicate progress to management. So agile processes can definitely indirectly impact how your productivity is perceived and measured.
> But IMO agile is not at all about measuring productivity, I'm not sure how you'd come to that conclusion?
It wasn't a conclusion it was a summation of what is happening when agile ideas are misused. I've seen it used that way too, it never ends way because nobody can measure a programmer's productivity/effectiveness.
This is absolutely correct. For example, what is the point of a sprint in Agile ? Do what one can finish in a sprint but try and finish "modules" while maintaining quality and carry over rest to next sprint. What does management read? Finish ... modules ... current sprint?
I do think that "Agile" is to blame. In my view the Agile software methodology is like Communism or libertarianism. Whenever you point out the myriad ways that it can fail in practice, someone always jumps out to say, "Well, what you're not describing is not true Agile. True Agile has never been tried!"
This is a great point. If there's a tool that no one can figure out how to use properly or effectively, it's hard to argue that the tool is well designed.
You could say the same about vim though...
Jokes aside, many resources about agile start with explaining how agile is “easy to understand, difficult to master”, and I think that’s true.
The difference is that vim is a specific tool, and if I see someone struggling repeatedly to be effective with vim, I can gently suggest that they try some other tool. But if I see a team repeatedly to implement something that looks like an Agile methodology, what do I tell them?
I suspect that many devotees of agile would speak at this point about getting management buy-in, or reforming the wider organization, but at this point "agile" just becomes shorthand for "reform your entire organization from top to bottom so that your management doesn't suck".
If the team struggles, the org does not need to be changed. However, from my point of view, companies should increase support for their teams when transitioning to agile. Training would be a good start. I have taken a few agile trainings, and they have been among the best I had in my career.
You've hit the nail squarely on the head. The problem with Agile isn't Agile itself, but the fact that humans can't keep themselves from using the data it produces to their own non-Agile ends.
But maybe Agile is the source of problem with Agile. Agile, to me, is like the nitroglycerine of development methodologies. The explosive instability of Agile isn't a problem from outside that corrupts Agile - it arises from the methodology itself, which inherently invites abuse.
I think the issue with Agile is that software is a field in which is difficult to measure productivity easily. Then Agile comes along and offers the appearance of making it easy to score and and measure team and individual effectiveness. Sure it's "supposed" to be for the team to measure their own effectiveness and empower people to work more productively, but for folks in management roles, the opportunity to 'score' engineers based on Agile metrics is too attractive.
Once it becomes just a way to figure out who's not moving fast enough, or "failing to meet their commitments", of course people will hate it. It gets changed from a tool into a stick.