| Six months ago I joined an "agile" team. The team is completely disconnected from any reasonable interpretation of agile. No sprints. No stand-ups. No prioritized backlog. No sprint planning. No sprint reviews. There is a product owner, who is a BA, but I never speak to her. She's on a different floor. If I want to work on something, I literally have to ask the other developers if anyone has anything they need done. When I joined the team, we had a project manager who would create tasks in jira and assign them to individuals. When the task was finished, we assigned them back to the PM so he could assign them to a tester. The tasks were already broken down from user stories so I would often get "implement REST service for X" and someone else would get "implement web page for X". We have a new project manager who doesn't like agile. He is currently "resetting" the project by forcing the business to write a complete set of detailed requirements. They have until June 30 to finish that. In the meantime, the team will continue in a kind of limbo of "agile" but the PM has already committed the team to completing the project by Dec 31st even though the requirements won't be finished until Jun 30th. The budget is also fixed. I've asked the team why we don't do any of the agile things. Normally you'd at least get cargo cult stand-ups. They said they don't see the value in it. They've all been working on the project for 2+ years so they know what needs to be done. I pointed out that it makes it impossible for me to participate in the project in any meaningful way since I'm reduced to begging for work. They don't see a problem with that. "Just ask". Because it's "agile" there is no up-to-date technical documentation. So to get anything done (once I have work to do) involves finding out who in the team knows what I need to know and interrupting them. The guy who knows the most is a terrible communicator. "Just ask". I have an interview at another place on Friday. I think people will be genuinely surprised when I tell them I'm leaving. |