Mature Scrum
It's not uncommon to hear managers at many companies state they use the "Agile Method" or they have a "Mature Scrum" implementation. It's perhaps the biggest red flag that an organization is misinformed or ignorant about the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the Scrum framework. As one asks probing questions and they elaborate further, it quickly becomes clear that it simply another rebranding of a traditional, phase-gated, schedule-driven, Taylor-based process characterized by people working in silos with limited communication and a focus on output over outcomes.
At one company it was expressed that they rarely had a complete, possibly releasable Increment at the end of a Sprint. Rather they were focused on completing all the tasks in the release road map. Testing was executed on a separate cadence after development work was completed and handed off to another group, external to the company, which often resulted in rework interrupting the currently planned work. Topics discussed during Retrospectives were repeatedly about infrastructure and architecture, not the valuable aspects such as individuals and interactions which could improve the process and outcomes. Long days and weekends, a mountain of technical debt, many defects being released, and poor user experiences were the unappreciated cost.
Manifesto for Half-Arsed Software Development is an accurate picture of many organizations believing they are being agile in their efforts. Most of the executives, chiefs, managers, and even everyday technologists will not or cannot learn the history, meaning, and importance of the move away from the lazy, and disturbingly incorrect, misreading of Winston Royce's 1970 paper, Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, that became the foundation of the Waterfall approach. With this apathy, ignorance continues.
At one company it was expressed that they rarely had a complete, possibly releasable Increment at the end of a Sprint. Rather they were focused on completing all the tasks in the release road map. Testing was executed on a separate cadence after development work was completed and handed off to another group, external to the company, which often resulted in rework interrupting the currently planned work. Topics discussed during Retrospectives were repeatedly about infrastructure and architecture, not the valuable aspects such as individuals and interactions which could improve the process and outcomes. Long days and weekends, a mountain of technical debt, many defects being released, and poor user experiences were the unappreciated cost.
Manifesto for Half-Arsed Software Development is an accurate picture of many organizations believing they are being agile in their efforts. Most of the executives, chiefs, managers, and even everyday technologists will not or cannot learn the history, meaning, and importance of the move away from the lazy, and disturbingly incorrect, misreading of Winston Royce's 1970 paper, Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, that became the foundation of the Waterfall approach. With this apathy, ignorance continues.
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