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Yet it never occurs to them when dividing people into groups that maybe they're the incompetent ones...

Who's more competent? The person using Agile successfully and getting things done, the guy using no specific development process and getting things done, or the guy writing long blog posts about why he doesn't care for a development process he doesn't understand and doesn't need to participate in if he doesn't enjoy it?




I'm currently on two missions. In one of these, we kick ass. Deliver on schedule or even in advance. It's scrum, we simply work as a team of four and ship, ship, ship, ship, feature after feature and fix after fix. We have our hands free, management is trusting our cell with the strategic future of their Tech tree, and we deliver.

In the other mission, I am not making this up, I spend 1hour/day on poor excuses of stand up meetings, 3 hours/day in various meetings, 1hour/day on various administrative tasks and 3 hours/day preparing powerpoint plannings for the meetings of the next day, and I'm a dev. I work with equally awesome devs in either mission, but in this one the customer is absolutely crazy inefficient and a control freak, and the best example of what NOT to do with scrum I've ever seen.

So who is more competent? The me that's killing it with scrum in the first mission or the me that can't do anything because of scrum in the second mission?


The first you. The second you needs to run far away from what he's doing. :)

I was in that situation before -- bad agile is BAD. I was on a team of 4 developers with literally 8 project managers. I know how that daily 1 hour crappy stand up goes. I also know how it feels to have deliverables for half the project managers in any given week, and what it's like to get constantly interrupted by 8 different people during your minimal development time to answer non-urgent questions.

But you know what? Not everywhere is like that and you usually have a choice to find something else. You're obviously competent enough to find something else; you already have two things going on.

If they aren't doing it right and they aren't listening and you aren't happy, GTFO.




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