How Agile failed software developers and why SCRUM is a bad idea

hi everyone i'm gregory welcome back to not only code today i'm going to talk to you about how i believe that the agile movement over the last 20 years has actually failed software developers and how agile that started as a way to improve efficiency to improve productivity currently prevents people from being productive let's start [Music] the agile movement started around 20 years ago with the agile manifesto written and signed by some legendary programmers like martin fowler or ward cunningham there were a couple simple ideas in that manifesto that actually revolutionized software development things like prioritize individuals over processes prioritize working software over documentation and respond to change over blindly following a plan it all might seem pretty obvious right now but remember that back then there was no continuous deployment people were not releasing their software on daily basis if you worked on photoshop five or six in late 90s or early 2000s and there was a single point of release there was one final version that was burned on cds and sent to customers and if there was a bug there well bad luck so a lot has changed over these 20 years and while i believe that in terms of technology we're constantly making progress and that is very fast and that people adapt to new technologies very quickly in terms of management we are failing the management in software development fails to catch up and i will explain to you why i think that this is the case using two common tools and processes associated widely with agile scrum and jira i used to be a huge fan of scrum when i started my career in software development i thought that it's a great methodology that is very lightweight especially in comparison with the processes that i learned at university and i thought that the scrum events like spring planning or daily scrum are actually helping the team to be more productive and to be more efficient but over time i realized that a lot of this stuff is not necessary daily scrum is actually completely unnecessary well let me not be so dogmatic there are themes for which daily scrum works and they are teams for which daily scrum doesn't make sense i tried it in a bunch of different ways with a bunch of different teams we did stand-ups in the office we did asynchronous stand-ups we skipped send ups and all and let me tell you that i see little to no difference and in some teams removing that morning meeting actually made people more productive because they could start work at any time they wanted and they didn't have to take this break at some arbitrary time and that even excludes my experience with dysfunctional stand-ups where product owner speaks for half an hour and the whole meeting takes 45 minutes yes i've seen it happening but you see scrum even though it caused itself a framework it actually enforces the daily scrum to be there the same with other things like sprint review i don't even know if you know what sprint review is because so few teams actually implement that sprint review is kind of like a demo for stakeholders i don't do that because my stakeholders always know what we're working on because they work with us on daily basis so whenever something is ready they are able to check it before we deploy to production we don't need to do a demo for stakeholders at the end of two weeks sprint that is the second event of scrum that does not provide much value in some contexts and don't make me even start about the concept of sprint which is absolutely outdated in a world where software can be deployed hands even hundreds of times a day software development is continuous it's fluid but scrum turns it into a bunch of discrete blocks and i think that's an outdated concept and the worst part of that is that when i started my career scrum was there and now scrum is still there i joined some organizations the last couple of years and they were trying to introduce and to follow proper scrum something that i already consider outdated some people are still catching up and they are thinking yeah this is the future on the other side in terms of technology almost every organization that i know moved to for example ci cd pipeline something that was introduced 10 years ago almost everyone moved into that almost everyone in the front end uses component-based frameworks very few companies use jquery or static pages but in terms of management people are just stuck in that mentality of sprint and daily scrum and it's the same with jira the software that was initially created as a project management tool and advertised to agile teams as something that will make your agile team more productive agile says people over processes and then we have jira where you can create the most complicated and unnecessary workflows jira makes it easy to generate 20 different reports with one or two clicks but it doesn't allow you to assign two different people developer and tester to a task it is a bloatware that doesn't focus on productivity it doesn't focus on people who get the stuff done it focuses on people that track the report that track the data that need to get the data and pass it higher and before you tell me that jira is actually grey that has tons of integrations that jira next generation is wonderful and i just don't know how to configure it it's i work with a number of organizations with number of jira setups and it's at best mediocre jira does not promote good practices jira will fit whatever screwed up practices your organization already has so now you might be wondering how did it happen that this idea to revolutionize software development now makes us stuck in this mentality from 10 or 20 years ago and i believe that the answer is that the careers of many people depend on having things the way they are for example in terms of reporting in jira if you work in a large organization there are a lot of people up there in the hierarchy that don't even see the product that you're building the only thing they see are the reports that are produced by the subordinates that are collected from jira and other tools there are people out there whose job is to produce reports and pass it further and the higher you are in the hierarchy the less actually you have to do with technology and more you have to do with just high level decisions based on some numbers that you see in the report similarly with scrum careers of a lot of people depend on making sure that scrum is implemented and followed even if scrum itself prevents people from being more effective from being more productive for example the idea of scrub master started as you know facilitator someone who just makes sure that we know what to do we know how to do it but that role evolved into a profession now they are professional scrum masters that do their certificates by the way you can also be a certified scrum developer and organization like scrum alliance of offers three different certificates from scrum developers do you get it you can be a certified scrum developer like how bonkers is that so that professional scrum masters whose career is about being scrum master they will make sure that you follow all these rituals even if half of these processes are unnecessary because that's their job so agile has turned from an idea into an industry and now this industry has gotten such a wide adoption that people just follow these practices believing that they're the best practices out there even further enterprises adopt things like less or safe which are absolute abominations of the agile ideas i mean just look at this chart here look at this chart beautiful isn't it and now think that the principle of agile is people over processes and look again at this chart okay so now after all this rant you might think okay gregory so it's screwed up that we spend so much time in meetings following these practices that are absolutely redundant so what we can do about it and the answer is that's not much if you work in a large organization it is extremely difficult to remove some unnecessary processes and smaller organizations that are growing usually become more and more process heavy i believe that if you work for a small organization you can make sure to hold on to these simple productive processes as long as possible if you work for a large organization it's almost impossible to change it on a big scale but there is something that you can do and this is to automate the hell out of these processes so if your project manager or if your supervisor of anyone needs data just make sure to get time to automate it make sure that you do not need to spend more time than necessary on this stuff make sure that anything any artifact can be produced automatically if for whatever reason you need to track your time which is another concept then make sure that this time is tracked based on your comments maybe based on moving tasks from one column to another that you don't have to fill it manually and of course you can find organizations that are less heavy on the processes that do not emphasize those formal agile practices you can find organizations that hire people that want to get the stuff done that react to the problems and that respond to changes instead of blindly following the agile equivalent of bible or whatever this is unfortunately as i said if the organization becomes bigger the organization has higher hierarchy there are more people in between more layers then they start being more and more reliant on reports and other stuff and they care less about actually getting things done i've kind of accepted that this is the way it is right now and that these practices won't change so quickly so i try to always ensure that my team is as shielded as possible that they can focus on getting the things done i will be dealing with the formal stuff and i will try to limit the time that anyone in my team including me needs to spend on this formal stuff that is not helping our productivity and that's it for today folks i hope that you enjoy my rant about the failure of agile and to be fair again agile is a huge success in terms of adoption and i think it 20 years ago did something good and it changed a lot but i think that right now the organizations that are saying we need to be more agile are just completely wrong you don't need to be more agile you need to focus on letting people be more autonomous the organizations need to focus on letting people do more on letting people to spend most of their time doing their actual work instead of reporting the work that they've done as always folks if you enjoyed this video make sure to subscribe to my channel to like and comment on this video and i hope to see you next time take care [Music]

Channel: Not Only Code

Views: 198,169

Keywords: notonlycode, not only code, gregory witek, agile failed, how agile fails in practice, why agile fails, agile scrum problems, why agile fails in large enterprises, agile scrum doesnt work, agile fails, agile software development, agile project management, agile manifesto, why agile, why agile doesnt work, why agile projects fail, agile failed software developers, how agile failed software developers, jira fail, scrum fails, agile failure, scrum problems, why jira is bad

Id: KJ5u_Kui1sU

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021