A relevant and nuanced complication of agile by Dorian Taylor seeing it as a trauma based response where the core practice has gotten stuck and is preventing the industry from solving more fundamental issues.
Category: Agile
People see this kind of talk about self-governance and think there is no process or management in such a setup while usually there is more (and higher quality) than in a traditional organization. It’s also some of the best work you will ever do.
Having seen lots of teams stuck in the two week agile rat race, a framework like Shape Up seems like it could offer a lot of benefits. But also just changing things up can’t hurt at that point. What is agility if not also being able to iterate on the way you work?
https://jhall.io/archive/2022/06/19/a-gitflow-story/
Please let’s never talk about GitFlow ever again other than with stories like this of how we moved people away from it.
Some teams will be willing to try something else and see how it makes their lives radically better and others will refuse and put their heels in the sand.
Sure there are reasons why people react in a certain way, why some people are protective or conservative but those reasons are not destiny and everybody can choose agency and make things better.
What choice will you make?
“Stripped of their original purpose, this is what so many Scrum events have become: a series of actions performed by rote.”
A lot of it has become theater and sprint planning may be one of the worst things any organization can do.
https://chrisjameslennon.medium.com/the-age-of-scrum-is-over-185407ad705b
Lots of teams try to dogmatically implement scrum without looking at their team and goals. There are lots of alternative ways of doing things most of which will be more agile, not less.
Lots of examples here by Intercom about how to enable teams to ship as fast as possible and at the same time also as safely as possible.
- Be available after shipping
- Ship instrumentation first
- Use feature flags
- Ship to a small subset of traffic
- Ship the “read” path first
- Document and share your plan and actions
https://www.intercom.com/blog/ship-fast-safe-learn-from-production/
Momentum definitely is magic and I’d add that you get it by focusing on tempo.
Working in the Spotify organizational structure can be a bit tiresome but I’m glad we’re getting the important stuff from their product development culture, listed here by Jason Yip, right as well: aligned autonomy, trust and decoupling. Without those the structure indeed does not matter.
People leaving your team have a cost that is far far larger than what you can directly see (and we know what a challenge directing stuff that you can’t see is). These visualizations
by Benji Weber put forth a strong argument especially against people working as isolated individuals on things.