A Word About Forced “Agile”
There’s something that’s been on mind lately from my experiences in the “enterprise” world while contracting… something that’s been really eating at me. And it’s something I’d like to call “Forced Agile” and how it’s possibly the most destructive beast in our industry right now.
The symptoms are quite visible in any organization… different values, practices, and concepts that we use in the agile world for improving our teams are bastardized and turned against the team in the form of forced metrics that are required to be met. This doesn’t help the team one bit and honestly will simply cause the team much grief and do diddly squat to improve anything.
Four years ago I listened to Dave Thomas give a pretty good presentation on Cargo Cults and I’m now realizing something… most companies continue to use the cargo cult approach to adopting agile. They’ve bought into the silly idea that if you do X, Y and Z software will get released faster with zero defects. We’re better than that, and our industry deserves better than that.
Let’s drop this idea of agile being “a set of practices” to be strictly followed. If we really want to succeed at agile we first need to empower our teams to succeed. 
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February 3rd, 2010 at 11:52 pm
Nice blog post.
I totally agree. Kent Beck gave a great interview about being Agile as opposed to doing Agile. Here’s a similar blog about the interview with a link to the interview itself: http://finneycanhelp.blogspot.com/2008/01/xp-principles-support-you-kent-beck.html
February 4th, 2010 at 12:34 am
Can you talk more about this? I understand the distinction, but how would you identify it in a company, looking from the outside?
February 4th, 2010 at 3:29 am
nice blog. i see the same thing.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:41 am
@Will I think it’s easily identifiable by listening to the dev teams and stakeholders.
If the devs are writing lots of tests for getters and setters to keep management off their back, there’s a problem.
If the stakeholders don’t communicate with the dev teams outside of formal meetings, there’s a problem.
And overall, if the teams don’t own their estimations and rather than committing to complete work they’re committed to delivering what has been imposed upon them,forcing them to work long hours to meet deadlines, there’s a problem!
February 24th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
James,
Since you mentioned the cargo cult, here’s an article on Cargo Cult Project Management. Hope you’ll like it.