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by ellius
2692 days ago
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There’s: • Agile as a set of values • Agile as a set of practices • Agile as a faddish silver bullet marketed to people who don’t know any better I assume OP is thinking mainly of the latter two. It sounds like their business avoided formal standups and sprint planning, and didn’t generally care about Agile/Scrum etc. buzzwords. But I tend to agree with you that from a values perspective that seems perfectly Agile. |
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Agile has a dirty name now, but it's well-deserved, because most folks have had legitimately terrible experiences with stuff sailing under that banner.
I've had a legitimately awesome experience and I can't really use a different word, because it either creates confusion or sounds like sneaky wordplay and/or self-marketing hoopla.
I had a job where, due to the technology, I could not TDD. There was no sane way to version control. No CI/CD, changes had to be made in dev and then copied & pasted into prod. Before that I was in a job with pairing, TDD, CI/CD and an avowed commitment to agile.
Of the two, the ostensibly-not-agile was more agile, because it hewed closer to the values of talking to people and focusing on doing the most valuable thing first. I would work on projects by myself. When I wanted to learn more about my customers, I walked across the campus and talked to them. If I had something I wanted them to give their opinion on, I would ring them and tell them to take a look.
At the ostensibly-agile job we had a manager who talked to a middleman who talked to a board of directors who heard from a line manager who talked to his employees. It didn't matter how well we did the inner loop, because a lot of the time we just produced beautifully-engineered diversions.