| > The biggest difference I’ve noticed between Agile and agile shops is that ceremonies or lack thereof make no difference. The best project I ever worked on: one developer (me), one project manager on our side, one QA/test person at the client, and one manager at the client who was what we'd call a product owner on a scrum team. No ceremonies, no pointing, very little backlog grooming. Shared Bitbucket repo for issue tracking. Deployments scheduled every Tuesday when their QA person signed off on the feature working as expected (this was in the days before CI/CD became common). Worked great. Low friction, they got features and bug fixes, we didn't get hassled, and we could set up a call (or usually just a couple of emails) if we needed clarification or needed to explain why something was more complex to do than we or they originally thought. One of the best six month periods in my career, and I've been doing this stuff for almost 25 years. I don't mind some aspects of scrum, but the things I don't mind (mostly around team autonomy and self-organization) seem to be the same things that are quickest to get thrown out when someone gets impatient. |