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Survey Finds 'Agile' Competency Is Rare In Organizations (sdtimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
The 12th annual "State of Agile" report has just been released by CollabNet VersionOne, which calls it "the largest and longest-running Agile survey in the world." After surveying more than 1,400 software professionals in various roles and industries over the last four months of 2017, "Only 12% percent responded that their organizations have a high level of competency with agile practices across the organization, and only 4% report that agile practices are enabling greater adaptability to market conditions... The three most significant challenges to agile adoption and scaling are reported as organizational culture at odds with agile values (53%), general organizational resistance to change (46%), and Inadequate management support and sponsorship (42%)...
"The encouraging news is that 59% recognize that they are still maturing, indicating that they do not intend to plateau where they are." And agile adoption does appear to be growing. "25% of the respondents say that all or almost all of their teams are agile, whereas only 8% reported that in 2016."
The researchers also note "the recognized necessity of accelerating the speed of delivery of high-quality software, and the emphasis on customer satisfaction," with 71% of the survey respondents reporting that a DevOps initiative is underway or planned for the next 12 months.
"The encouraging news is that 59% recognize that they are still maturing, indicating that they do not intend to plateau where they are." And agile adoption does appear to be growing. "25% of the respondents say that all or almost all of their teams are agile, whereas only 8% reported that in 2016."
The researchers also note "the recognized necessity of accelerating the speed of delivery of high-quality software, and the emphasis on customer satisfaction," with 71% of the survey respondents reporting that a DevOps initiative is underway or planned for the next 12 months.
Management and leadership styles need to depend on your team, if you use agile/scrum/kanban/etc it means you are trying to make up for shitty management skills, and in turn are making everyone else waste 10-30% (50%-75% in extreme cases) of their time to make up for it. There is no one management or leadership style (two VERY different things, mind you) to bind them all.
Managers are glorified communal secretaries, they exist to arrange meetings, sit between upper management/clients and developers, and ensure the developers have the appropriate resources while having out extraordinarily high-level orders (e.g. "we have a new project, figure it out,") they don't make decisions but ask for input from all parties involved and arrange the information such that people who make decisions can make them quickly and accurately.
Leaders are just the most applicable guy for a given project the others will listen to, they're in the trenches do the work and can (often should) change from project to project both due to differing skillsets and to prevent burnout of the leader.
Nearly every shit place has the same problem, and it has nothing to do with Agile/Scrum/etc - the shit problem is when you have a person who thinks they are capable of both leading and managing at the same time - nobody is.
I thought it was more of a cargo cult. Do the right motions, and the gods will reward you with deliverables.
Considering that agile is a giant scam to sell consulting, training, books, etc.... low adoption only means more customers to fleece!
I was watching a video where one of the guys who came up with it mention the alternative name that one of the other guys really liked. He wanted to call it conversational development. That is so much better of a name for what you're trying to do. Everything is supposed to be a conversation. A conversation is a 2 way street which is the entire fucking point. There isn't supposed to be a deal where say a project manager dictates what he wants and the devs have no say, just do it bitches. You're not supposed to have dev dump a release to QA, deal with it bitches. Hell, you're supposed to have conversation between junior and senior developers to turn the juniors into seniors. I get they called it agile to sell it to corporate but the problem is that by doing it they convinced corporate agile is just "Go fast be stupid"
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Agile, or more specifically Scrum is pointless. When you have a daily stand-up meeting that can take six hours ...
Well... Daily scrum meetings are *suppose* to only be 15 minutes, but either (a) they aren't and are a waste of time (as you described) or (b) actually are and are a bigger waste of time. What it does ensure is that everyone is micro-managed into being at (or dialed into) that meeting every day at, like, 9:30am -- even though many (most?) companies have "flextime" -- 'cause management loves managing people.
Look. I *imagine* these meetings could be useful if you have a team of inexperienced people that need constant "guidance", but otherwise, working with experienced, responsible people, I've never run across anything that couldn't be more simply handled with emails to the appropriate people *if* something *isn't* on track.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
In the Agile/Scrum environments I worked at, it wasn't handled by E-mail. Calendar appointments would magically appear, because the Scrum master, PM, manager, team lead, and backup team lead all had delegation authority to add meetings without approval, and these were "The Apprentice" like boardroom confrontations that lasted for hours.
I'm glad I'm away from that. My current place uses a modified waterfall model, and it works quite well, with projects getting done on time.
Very few of the proponents of "Agile" seem to have actually read and understood the Agile Manifesto.
Where I work, the introduced Scrum about 2 years ago. We were more agile before that, but our process, which was well adapted to our situation, didn't have a name since it had evolved internally (together with the customers) for about 10 years. We made a mistake not to connect a buzzword to it.
The output has dropped considerably with Scrum, much because of the planning meetings, but also because of the treatment of all the developers as "resources" instead of individuals. So instead of letting the team divide the work between them as they see optimal, everyone now has to work on all parts of the system regardless of knowledge or ability (this is a big system). So far no sprint has resulted in a working release and every sprint starts with tasks to make the previous release work. The testers are upset because they don't get _anything_ from the team until the last days of the sprint, whereas we used to have a constant flow of work to test (and subsequently release).
I guess Scrum can be an improvement if the organisation is completely non-agile from the start, but for us it was a great step backwards.
True agile development is wonderful, but management has to let go of some control for it to work properly, which is why we get "Agile" instead.
Welcome to the 88% that don't do agile correctly.
I've worked in a shop which did, and it was honestly amazing. The company embraced it, institutionalized it, and ensured that they had the expertise to do it right.
Daily standup was great. No more than the team and 1-3 product owners or managers in the room, 10 people, 1 minute each. What did you accomplish yesterday, what are you working on today, and any issues you're having or expecting. That was it. And the scrum master kept people from going on and on - two guys would regularly get "your minute is up" warnings, and everyone learned to make them as uncomfortable as possible or just start their 1 minute talk over top of them because standup was serious business.
What happened in there was that everyone on the team knew who was going to be touching what, and that lead to either avoiding code that was going to be touched or collaboration when two members were working on related stuff. The team leads and more experienced members could pinpoint where the newer members were getting stuck and help them over humps, or steer them away from bad coding decisions. (Outside of standup, of course.) The product owners got a thermometer on what was getting done, so they could update their roadmaps and tell the bosses, marketing, and other people what was going on. That meant the developers didn't have to waste time dealing with those people.
It also meant that sprint planning meetings were done with a broader institutional understanding of the current state of development, which tended to lead to more reasonable sprints.
Overall, it was a well-oiled machine, and it was very productive. In great part it was because the head of IT effectively used the agile framework to shield developers from institutional stupidity. When 10-15 minutes of your morning is all that management gets to waste of your time, you can get a lot done. It meant they all felt included in the development process, and had a structured way to interact with the devs rather than just calling random meetings and dragging everyone away from their work. And by having product owners closer to the work, they could answer the questions that management wanted, rather than the developers doing it.
I'd happily work in an environment like that again. What people normally describe agile to be like, however, seems to be a nightmare.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
According to Scrum.org, a big part of Agile competence is understanding what the entire point of Agile is, and it's NOT supposed to make development faster or cheaper.
The point of Agile and Scrum, according to an article on Scrum.org, is to provide a way to deal with situations where you can't go sit with users to understand what the actual requirements are, and you can't look at some legacy system you're replacing, so you have no way of defining the requirements except "try something and ask users if it's getting closer to what they want." Scrum is a system to quick iterate through different things, presenting each possible deliverable until you get close to what users need.
If you CAN go sit with users and take notes as you watch them work, if you CAN look carefully at the system you're replacing, if you have any way of defining requirements before you start coding, Agile iterations will take LONGER than just defining the requirements and then building something that meets the requirements (while being conscious of boxing yourself in, because next year requirements may change a bit).