Patricia AasMay 25
This whole Agile Coach debacle has helped me realize something that hadn’t fully landed with me before: agile started as a movement driven by builders to «build better», but it is largely dominated now with people who don’t know how to build and look at agile as a management process style. These are MBA-like folks who are trying to figure out how to manage an IT organization. But that wasn’t what agile was about. It was about a better way to build stuff, better stuff, by collaboration and not getting stuck in our ways.
Show threadjoep schuurkesMay 25
@Patricia Reminds me of @einarwh saying in a talk at @boosterconf:
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. And what do we end up with? Scrum and Jira."
Show threadPatricia AasMay 25
@joeposaurus @einarwh @boosterconf oh my, what a gut-punch. He’s speaking the truth tho, as he does uncomfortably often and well.
Show threadEinar W. HøstMay 29
@Patricia @joeposaurus @boosterconf What's crazy but needs recognition I guess is that in many cases, for many people, Scrum and Jira were a great improvement on whatever came before. As Alistair Cockburn put it, "Scrum struck a magnificent bargain in hostile territory", the deal being that management could change their mind between sprints, and no-one would pester the team during the sprints.
Show threadEinar W. HøstMay 29
@Patricia @joeposaurus @boosterconf That's not to say it's a deal that delivered on the promises of the Agile manifesto (how could it?) or that it's the best possible deal today. (Though my impression is that many think that realistically, we won't be able to do much better than that.)
Show threadPatricia AasMay 29
@einarwh @joeposaurus @boosterconf I’ve seen better. And not only once. I know it can be done. But it requires leadership that allows it to happen, and I feel that tech leadership has drifted over to «career leadership» and they don’t get what we do. They come from all over and they don’t get the process. They want something «cleaner». But it is messy, and that’s not a bug. We are trying to figure out what we should build by building it, we’re learning what we should’ve built by living with it.
Show threadEinar W. Høst
@Patricia @joeposaurus @boosterconf I agree with that. I’ll add that so-called “technical people” or more broadly “those who build” also need to step up to the plate. Not everyone wants to. Quite a few prefer life as well-paid, well-protected slik worms feeding on Jira tickets, leaving the messy parts to “the grown-ups” (the most undignified phrase that developers utter).
May 29 at 6:06pmMastodon for iOS
Show threadPatricia AasMay 29
@einarwh @joeposaurus @boosterconf fair. But I also think that many people think that «they» («the grownups») must know what they’re doing. And, in theory, I don’t think that’s an unfair expectation. But «they» don’t, and it’s affecting what we build and how we build.
Show threadEinar W. HøstMay 29
@Patricia @joeposaurus @boosterconf I agree that's a fair assumption, and also that it quite often doesn't hold. I have met some "grown-ups" who knew their stuff though, real product people if you like, who cared about the domain and could go deep. But obviously I've also met generic managers doing generic management.
Show threadEinar W. HøstMay 29
@Patricia @joeposaurus @boosterconf Which really exacerbates the problems with the Scrum pact and the developer terrarium arrangement btw, since they're typically the messengers between "the business" and the development team. Clueless messengers cause a lot of problems.
Show threadEinar W. HøstMay 29
@Patricia @joeposaurus @boosterconf But I've also seen plenty of learned helplessness in development teams, people wailing "if only they'd let us do the right thing" "actually, you can just do it, no-one's stopping you" "IF ONLY THEY'D LET US"
Show threadEinar W. HøstMay 29
@Patricia @joeposaurus @boosterconf So it cuts all ways in my experience. But that's not to say that we can't do better. I definitely think we can.
Show threadPatricia AasMay 30
@einarwh @joeposaurus @boosterconf yeah, I agree with all of this