Yep. Agile theater often happens when whoever wears (or doesn't) the PM "hat" doesn't have a clue beyond their so-called certifications and amateur "expert" non-experience because they're afraid of appearing incompetent. Then, it reverts to: Big Design Upfront -> Big Deliverables at the End -> sad, expensive fail.
Agile means:
- Build-test-feedback-adjust loop is as tight as possible... hours or less to get a fix or a quick feature.
- The end-users are involve from the beginning to constantly get what they really need (capture good requirements, not necessarily what they ask for directly) and feedback to make usability/feature improvements.
- Someone is prioritizing fixes and features from what users need right now to do something useful, rather than arbitrarily shotgunning features in milestones.
- Just enough intra-sprint time is dedicated to test improvements, bug hunting and refactoring.
- Using continuous integration (CI) and/or continuous deployment (CD).
- You are what you measure and post publicly. A giant dashboard in the office to show key metrics like open tickets, who's working on what, app load, app latency, shopping carts/sales, current scaled-infrastructure costs, etc.
- Minimum ad-hoc meetings and very few scheduled all-hands.
- Let developers focus on one or two tasks rather than constantly interrupting them. Some sort of office GTD system combined with industrial andon light towers to signal: serious concentrating, light work, need to socialize, or not in.
- Unless you're building an elevator, fission reactor or an intersellar space ship, be against waterfall development.
I'm forgetting a million other things like mindset and differences in processes, but the above is a rough sketch.
I do this all the time: It's too easy and too comfortable to get wrapped-up in technologies, methodologies or building out elaborate processes and bussiness-y minutia, which I think is a procrastination / ego defense-mechanism because of a core fear of many people of rejection from the user(s). It's so very easy to build something for yourself, but emotionally more difficult to build things others will see differently.
Agile means:
- Build-test-feedback-adjust loop is as tight as possible... hours or less to get a fix or a quick feature.
- The end-users are involve from the beginning to constantly get what they really need (capture good requirements, not necessarily what they ask for directly) and feedback to make usability/feature improvements.
- Someone is prioritizing fixes and features from what users need right now to do something useful, rather than arbitrarily shotgunning features in milestones.
- Just enough intra-sprint time is dedicated to test improvements, bug hunting and refactoring.
- Using continuous integration (CI) and/or continuous deployment (CD).
- You are what you measure and post publicly. A giant dashboard in the office to show key metrics like open tickets, who's working on what, app load, app latency, shopping carts/sales, current scaled-infrastructure costs, etc.
- Minimum ad-hoc meetings and very few scheduled all-hands.
- Let developers focus on one or two tasks rather than constantly interrupting them. Some sort of office GTD system combined with industrial andon light towers to signal: serious concentrating, light work, need to socialize, or not in.
- Unless you're building an elevator, fission reactor or an intersellar space ship, be against waterfall development.
I'm forgetting a million other things like mindset and differences in processes, but the above is a rough sketch.
I do this all the time: It's too easy and too comfortable to get wrapped-up in technologies, methodologies or building out elaborate processes and bussiness-y minutia, which I think is a procrastination / ego defense-mechanism because of a core fear of many people of rejection from the user(s). It's so very easy to build something for yourself, but emotionally more difficult to build things others will see differently.