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That is the most amazingly disheartening thread. Apparently, it’s worse than I imagined. Complaints against agile where the specifics are the *same* specifics we were complaining about 25 years ago. I mean:
- X is intent on making people fungible. We said that then!
- X is rewarmed Taylorism. Taylor was *our* whipping boy!
- Micromanagment. We were all about “self organization”!
- Empty ceremony. That too.
Damn you all, all you who made it a management fad. https://kolektiva.social/@iarna/110894973836673348
...
I remember around 2002, I visited a successful Scrum team. The product owner told me, “This is a lot more work and responsibility, but I can’t imagine doing a project any other way.” (That echoed the attitude of the whole team.)
It was probably less than a decade later that I was contracted to help with a “rollout of Scrum across the organization”, and a programmer told me “At least my job doesn’t suck as much as it used to.” That was when I resolved to get out of Agile consulting.
…
…
I suspect that Agile actually *did* improve the lot of the average team member – but even less than I’d supposed. And not in a way that actually matters for their happiness, which I claim was a big part of the original motivation.
So not only did we fail, we somehow queered the pitch. What we wanted to be liberatory is now seen as oppressive. Meaning our insights will be discarded. It will all be reinvented.
Well, crap.
…
I was the second chair of the Agile Alliance. (It was much more… casual in those days.) With the advent of the two-day “certified ScrumMaster” course, I pushed for a statement saying that “Um, two days of training is only the start of your ★agile journey★. There is so much to learn!”
It was published. Officially. May still be on the site. Didn’t do a damn bit of good.
I feel bad about my stewardship.
Perhaps it’s overly self-indulgent / romantic to think of this Hunter Thompson quote, thereby comparing “millennial agile” to the ‘60s.
From /Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas/ (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7745.Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas)
@marick I feel like the majority of folks' complaints about agile are really about time-wasting meetings from bad managers that would happen regardless of what they were called.
@jaymcgrath Yes, but the question is what could people like me have done to prevent that.
@marick Perhaps not much? I feel like this pattern plays out everywhere people and ideas meet. I think agile was a net positive for getting folks engaged with the why in software, and I really appreciate it, no matter what my standups are actually like :)
@jaymcgrath You are probably right with “perhaps not much”. Maybe I’m feeling self-indulgent. Shouting loudly against inevitability is maybe more pleasing than whispering, given that you’re going to be steamrollered over in either case. But, really, what difference does it make, from the broader perspective?
@marick I think there is something accurate about the timing of the introduction of the word Agile as an umbrella term. Agile always makes me think of the line from If by Rudyard Kipling “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,”
@marick I remember Kent Beck's keynote at the XP 2002 conference in Alghero, noting the same sense of failure from the SEI people. They'd developed the Capability Maturity Model to share insights about what worked and what didn't, to try to help software development organizations get better, and tell if they were on the right path. And then it got wrapped up in management consulting, with awful offshore consulting shops touting that they were "CMM Level 5 certified," and it all went sour.
@pclark I tend to attribute good motives to people, and so I believe it.
@marick all knowledge begins as heresy and ends as superstition- julian huxley
@vy Too pat, but not a bad rule of thumb. Thanks.
@marick a lot of the english intellectuals of that period seem to have aspired to being Oscar Wilde characters.
@marick It's threads like this that convinces me the word "agile" is irreversibly corrupted. It will not communicate what we intend it to communicate.
In this environment, I don't think there's any effective way to talk methodology without going immediately into the specifics.
@cvennevik Yes. Divorcing “agile” from technical practices (and the explanation behind them) was a fatal error. Well, maybe. The forces of reaction and hierarchy would probably have won out anyway.
@marick Yeah, I can't say that it would have changed which forces won out, but maybe we'd get to spend less time arguing about True Agile Scotsmen.
@cvennevik Oh there’s *plenty* of room to both *be* One True Scotsman about technical practices and also accuse others of it. Both at the same time, for the skilled practitioner.
@marick In the early days, what size were the largest companies that “did agile right”? My impression from third-hand sources was always that agile was mostly adopted by small high-functioning teams in tech-focused companies, and that most people dealing with terrible “agile” these days are working for large bureaucratic institutions that are intentionally structured in a way that limits the decision-making impact of individual teams. Is that at all accurate?
@jnkrtech My impression is different, perhaps biased because I was most aware of the Agile people who’d done the Smalltalk–>Patterns–>Agile transition. Because of that, my impression was that Agile sprang from specific teams in *non*-tech-focused companies. Chrysler and “a large Boston-based mutual fund company” got a lot of attention. In the UK, Agile was associated with financial firms (what else does London do?) which weren’t tech-focused like, say, Google, I think.
@jnkrtech A significant early Agile project applied XP to the aftermath of the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorist attack. If I remember right, it involved using DNA evidence to identify remains. Fast iterations. Changing requirements. Close collaboration.
My impression from the early days was that the software-centric companies were most hostile to Agile. I gave a talk to Google, pre-IPO. They were not impressed.
@jnkrtech I’m not able to comment on the state of things today.
@marick This is really great information and is definitely news to me, thanks!
The reason I ask is that if the complaints about agile are the same as the complaints about waterfall, then I wonder less “how did agile lose its way” and more “what structural similarities are there between organizations pre-agile and post-agile?” I want to wave my hands and say something vague about the employer/employee relationship, but if I’m being honest I haven’t connected the dots well enough to make an actual argument.
@jnkrtech I think you are correct to think that power dynamics had (much) more of an affect than did the content of Agile.
@marick Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
@marick no reason to feel bad. Everyone had good intentions, they just got kinda mixed up. Not a single person blames you.
@peregrine Thanks.
I’m not worried about blame. It’s more the feeling of having a beloved pet die, coupled with the feeling of having wasted years of work. It’s not *that* different from spending a fair part of two years on https://leanpub.com/outsidefp and having it be met with a combination of indifference and “how dare you!” rejection.
Like: it wasn’t wrong to try, but I could have been playing Civilization instead.
@marick You acted in good faith. That’s more than many can claim for themselves.
@jlink Thanks. But “acting in good faith but failing” is of little comfort when you reflect on what world you actually created.
@marick looking back - is there anything you would do differently with the knowledge you have today?
@mainec I pushed the Agile Alliance to produce a statement against two-day scrummaster certifications that ended up pretty milquetoast. I would push much harder, knowing what I know now.
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@mainec …
In the ill-fated second gathering of the Agile Manifesto people, we agreed to all go our own way. That was a mistake. The individuals focused on exploitation had the support/incentive to push hard. We who thought them crass were just a bunch of individuals, without any countervailing influence/support.
Had what could have been a majority of the original authors banded together, they could have really dented what turned into a counter-reaction…
I’d like to think.
@marick I don't think you should feel bad. I think the Agile Manifesto has tremendous value and is a huge contribution to the evolution of the field....
I do fear it came too late to have the lasting effect that you hoped. After power had already begun to shift away from engineers to MBAs and certified Project Managers. There may have been an earlier window where software development may have become a prestige field that set their own mode of work like doctors and lawyers...
@marick But as we are seeing now with the entry of private equity into those spaces, even those professions are not immune to the idea that all labor must ultimately submit to management by capital for the benefit of capital.
It's not your fault, nor particularly your failure.
@cammerman I think you’re right. I hear from Dawn that veterinary medicine, formerly a field where the career progression was that you would eventually own your own small practice, is now a field where the majority of people are employees of some large entity (PetSmart).
Given that even in the early 2000s Dawn was wont to compare, unfavorably, the standard of care she gave cattle to that which she got at our HMO, things are looking grim.
@cammerman I don’t feel bad about having failed, not exactly. It’s more a feeling that I wasted more of my life than I should have. I bailed from Agile consulting at some point, but it now seems to me I waited too long. I ended up doing other things, but I could have been doing them earlier.
Of course, I did get paid well for riding Agile’s decline, but I also spent a ton of pro bono time explicating certain ideas long after that was pointless.
@marick That makes sense.
I can't give you the time back, and I am just one person, but for what it's worth grokking the Agile Manifesto has been invaluable for me and I still go to it frequently to navigate through process dysfunction and change.
I don't always grab from the "Agile tool bag" , but I use the Manifesto values as a north star for talking about process and team dysfunction and change. It works.
@cammerman Thanks. I found myself thinking of the left-side phrases of the Agile Manifesto as “anti-trigger words”. Draft below. I’m trying to make things more concrete-feeling than “values” or Farrell’s “shared vision” in /Collaborative Circles/.
“Anti-trigger words” is not, um, the catchiest phrasing, but what would you expect from the person who coined “Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed With Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism”?
@marick pardon me if you've repeatedly said this elsewhere, but what would be good references for those insights/ways of working? I feel like I can't trust anything I read about it
@aisamu @marick I always go to the manifesto, and Simon Wardley's Doctrine ("things we should always be doing when we are working") and then apply them to "whatever the team is doing right now".https://www.wardleymaps.com/doctrine
Then start with phase one and figure out what changes we can individually and collectively make to improve things and wish around the things we can't change directly due to external factors.
@aisamu I’m not sure I understand what “those” refers to. If it’s how people were working back around ~2000, I’d think the place to look would be the C2 wiki (https://wiki.c2.com/) and archives of the Yahoogroup mailing lists. The extremeprogramming list seems to be archived here: https://extremeprogramming.yahoogroups.narkive.com/
However those, especially the latter, would require historian-level wading through lots of writing.
@marick Perhaps a (huge?) part of how Agile failed is because liberation is antithetical to capitalism?
@marick once saw Alan Cooper get asked, circa 2000, what he thought about XP specifically, & I forget his exact words but he was characteristically blunt: he thought it was a symptom of failure. I think he may have used the term 'cry for help.'
@FeralRobots A cry for help from whom?
@marick
Devs. He agreed strenuously that the movement was about trying to reclaim agency, but he seemed very confident that it wouldn't work.
I think Cooper was probably a little too optimistic about his own preferred solution because he was gonna always want the process to be more user-focused & give more of a shit about quality, & I don't think that was ever gonna happen either. He's retired now & I gather very happy to be out of it, though he will still opine on occasion.
@marick TBC when I talk about people who don't give a shit about quality or aren't really user-focused, I'm not talking about the devs. (devs do sometimes fall down on the latter count, but Cooper thought he had solutions for that in tools like personas. big aside, but from working in advertising I saw how that ended up. 'Badly' would suffice for now.)
@FeralRobots I didn’t write clearly. Who were the devs crying out to, requesting help?
I had limited interaction with Cooper, but I recognize your account.
I did visit a team that was persona-centric, and that seemed to work out pretty well for them as a way to nudge them back when they started forgetting about the end users. (I came in well after the 4-I-think personas had become part of the culture. How based they were in Cooper-style research, I dunno.)
@marick it wasn't clear to me at the time ( who they were crying out to) & honestly I don't think it occurred to me to ask.
@FeralRobots I would like to think we were taking specific actions rather than crying out for help. But I agree about the motivation.