In my short time as a software developer (< 2 years) I've seen an interesting pattern around me. People claiming to work agile or being agile are far less agile than those who say to try to be or work agile.
The worst "agile" experience definitely was in my ex company. They always claimed to be agile - because why not, everybody is agile and it sounds nice. But there war nearly nothing behind those words, because those people have no idea why they want (or don't want) to work agile.
Ok cause, we had a daily (status report). Yeah, that's great. Dailies are kind of nice, even my kindergarten had a daily. Guess it was an agile kindergarten.
But that daily was completely useless as it wasn't possible to coordinate as developers as it's main purpose was to entertain the manager and give him the feeling that he would do some work.
Another major fail was the "welcoming change" part. Welcoming change isn't easy for anyone, but I can't see any possibility to work agile without being at least able to accept change. And I don't consider it a solution for that personal problem to simply stop "working agile" the moment change is coming up. At this point it was clear, that there never was any agile development at all.
This made me think about what red flags of anti-agility I might have missed before.
- Obsession with scrum-themed names for meetings, but avoiding to talk about the meaning of those -- because it's just for the show
- "We need to make the contract with the client as tight as possible so they don't have any chance to change something" -- clear fear of change
- "We can't ask the client, we have to decide it now and they have to accept." -- fear of losing control, even in things that are none of you business
- Inability to divide the important, large decisions from the small details, leading to an inability make things fix as late as possible
- Making rehearsals before the meetings with the client
- Unwilling to talk about each persons responsibilities, especially when they are a boss
- Constant interruptions throughout the day by management
- Replying with "We must do agile development or the startups will take everything from us" when asked why you want to work agile.
There were many more which I might have missed. Have you found anti-agile behaviours in your work environment?
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