| From what I've seen there are about four kinds of approaches to Agile, in the wild: 1) "We love agile! We have coaches and everything!" (terrible) 2) "We're agile-ish." (we have performative, hellish standups that are mostly about micromanagement, in which we all get to nervously try to justify our continued employment every day by acting out little one-man plays about how hard yesterday was while going into way too much detail) 3) A range of noncommittal responses that may look a lot like 2 in some cases (often really good, but it's hard to distinguish from #2) 4) "We love agile!" (they actually do, and they actually do adjust processes and add/remove/modify "ceremonies" pretty quickly when the team asks for it; this can be good) The trouble is it's really hard to tell which you're dealing with (aside from maybe #1, though that can be hard to distinguish from #4 unless they really do start laying out all the dedicated "agile roles" they have, then you can tell it's probably #1). At this point I'd probably insist on sitting in for a couple "agile ceremonies" before I said yes to a place that "does agile". It's bad more often than not, but can be anywhere from OK to good. When it's bad, though, it's really bad. I'm not sure how to tell which it is without observing what they actually do. |