

Intro to Scalable Agile: Scale Your Teams and Release More Frequently - adamfeber
http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/88421/Intro-to-Scalable-Agile-Scale-Your-Teams-and-Release-More-Frequently.aspx

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bluesnowmonkey
This is not agile in any sense that I recognize. The first value in the agile
manifesto is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools." Yet,
Scalable Agile appears to be _completely_ about processes and tools. In fact,
I don't see a single reference to actual, direct interaction between two
people in the entire article. I particularly dislike this quote:

> Code management tools were neglected in the last generation of agile
> methodologies, which focused on interactions between people. However, the
> reality is that managing code is a lot easier than managing people.

Managing people is hard, let's go shopping!

Going agile doesn't mean that a team replaces its managers with automated
tools. Kind of the opposite, actually. "The most efficient and effective
method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-
face conversation." That's also from the manifesto. It means you should be
talking more, not less. Don't write an email to get someone's help, go talk to
them. Don't file a ticket to express a requirement, go talk to somebody. Don't
sit around rearranging stories in a backlog in order to convey priorities,
stand up and _tell people what the priorities are_. Push decisions down. Talk
to people. Let them self-organize. Don't force feed them a backlog of
"stories" like cows in a factory farm.

True story, I once worked in an "agile shop" where my direct supervisor told
me that there was no assigned seating, but I couldn't sit at _this_ unoccupied
table, I had to sit at _that_ adjacent one, because that's where the
developers sat. Also his seat was reserved, so don't sit there. And that was
nearly the only time he ever spoke to me. So I have kind of a beef concerning
"agile" shops with shitty management.

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hankin
Long post, but lots of good stuff.

