"I Hate Agile!" | Allen Holub On Why He Thinks Agile And Scrum Are Broken

[Music] um i i i i looked up some of the stuff some of your writing some of your videos and so on in kind of prepping for this and one of the things that resonated with me um that i like a lot and and as we were discussing before this episode one of the dangers of this is that we're going to be agreeing too much but you in one of your videos you quoted andy hunt who said that agile has come to to mean doing half of scrum badly and using jira which i really like i i i i laughed out loud when you said it so so what what what's broken about agile what's broken what's not broken about actually it's probably a better question you know i i still use the word um unlike some of some some of the people that i know that are kind of high-end agile people including andy right is that the the um who signed the agile manifesto um they're avoiding the word entirely is that it's turned into such a steaming pile of garbage that nobody wants to touch it including the people that invented it so that's a problem you know and the the um i'm still using it because well i'm i work as a consultant and i have to use the word or else nobody will hire me but the um the thing that i do has essentially nothing to do with what people think of as agile anymore yeah you know and i don't know how many times like on twitter or some platform like that i'll see somebody saying i hate agile it's awful if we only paid attention to each other as human beings and worked small and did things iteratively we wouldn't have a pro you know i'd that'll work great we don't need any of this agile stuff and i'm going you just described this agile stuff what's going on right so you know people have come to uh basically as andy says it's half of scrum badly and jira is that it's turned into tools and bad processes and all this other stuff i was i was i tweeted the other day i was probably being a little bit too sarcastic but i said you know i really have nothing against scrum at all his scrum is just fine if we all we have to do is get rid of the sprint and the scrum master and the product owner and the backlog and the sprint review and the notions of accountability and the notions of commitment and the certificates and i have nothing against scrum at all and that's kind of my feeling right now is that you know true seriously the if you read the scrum guide it's not going to do much damage yeah it's mostly harmless to use douglas adams douglas adams is that scrum as described as essentially nothing right it's a lightweight rapper and a few ridiculous meetings that you're supposed to go to and okay fine if you really want to do that i don't care um it's all the stuff that people have added to it over the years that has made it awful right and the the the my main issue with it is that it's so lightweight that you can just get rid of it is that you know xp works fine without scrum in fact scrum was originally invented or pushed in the original book so go go get schwaber and beatles original book on scrum um on the on the cover of the book it says scrum is basically a wrapper that you can put around extreme programming in order to make it more palatable for management and that's all that's all that scrum was when it started out and if you look at it that way well fine but um the point is is that scrum xp without scrum works fine and scrum without xp doesn't work at all so what are we doing you know why why bother and the uh i don't i don't know is that it's a source of frustration for me obviously and of course [Laughter] shitty agile for enterprises yeah exactly yeah everybody else i i i i i gather from the way that you talk obviously i agree one of one of my takes is that what is that one of the reasons why why agile why scrum kind of became synonymous with agile because it was the easiest one to cheat as usual i think that's kind of saying i don't think it's so much that is what is the original intent was to make something that actually was agile more palatable to the business and by that what they mean is more acceptable to somebody who doesn't really understand or want to be agile yeah right that's that's why it exists that's the very reason for it to exist so of course people are going to then run with it because there's a there's a there's been a focus on something that you do around agile rather than being agile itself yeah it might make sense so as soon as you start focusing on scrum rather than on being agile you end up focusing on the wrong things you focus on things that make it palatable to management rather than focusing on actually being agile yeah yeah it's built it's built in it's part of the it's just you know you can't do scrum without that it's it's a it's it's built in and you know there's a bunch of stuff in scrum now which is in my cynical mind i'm going this is just pandering to large corporate clients in order to sell more certificates yeah things like the notions of accountability and commitment it's just appalling to me i hate it right so do you it's quoting bob marshall right is that he thinks of this as the language of violence and i kind of agree with that right it's you know accountability is you do what i say here and i'm going to hold you accountable for that and i the the that stuff was deliberately removed from scrum for for years another put it back and that's kind of appalling why did they do that and all i can think of is well we need to sell more certificates in the our big corporate clients are really big on accountability so back it goes into the scrum guide and you know and then all of the scrum trainers are parroting that language i just it drives me crazy when a scrum trainer just quotes the scrum guide chapter and versus if it's the bible and they talk about about inspection and adaption and i go that's a weird phrase whoever says adaption what does that mean right and it's not as if you know and inspect and adapt has been part of agile from day one so scrum claiming that annoys me but the kind of quoting of the scrum guy back at me just drives me crazy i'm gonna i'm gonna quote you back at you because another one of the things that i picked up that i really liked you said agile has become a priesthood where the priests don't understand the rituals they're telling people to follow i think that's exactly right you know and well some of them do that's the annoying thing right i know a couple of of the scrum.org trainers um without exception i really respect them they really know what they're talking about they really understand agile properly but they still fall back onto this chapter and verse something you know scrum guide thumping almost biblical approach to it and i so it frustrates me that somebody who's basically good would then do that because that's what ken schwaber is requiring right is that he they have to use his material and they they present the stuff that he tells them to present and how agile is that to just mimic something that somebody else gives you and i i almost wish that all of these people would just disassociate themselves from the scrum organizations that they're associated with but they don't do that because because it's a business decision and in other words they're saying there's a huge market for people doing scrum training so i'm going to position myself as a scrum trainer and that i i don't have any i can't find any fault in that there's nothing wrong with that at all right everybody's got to make a living and if they're going to position themselves as scrum trainers that's fine but i still find it frustrating is that because it's kind of pushing but when you have good people who know what they're doing pushing something that i think of is not good um it's it's sort of driving the industry in a direction that i wish it was not driving him [Music]

Channel: Continuous Delivery

Views: 141,479

Keywords: agile, agile methodology, problems in agile, agile scrum, scrum, scrum vs agile, allen holub, allen holub talk, allen holub interview, software development, software engineering, computer science, Dave Farley, software podcast, software interview, the engineering room, agile project management, agile does not work

Id: WSflPE_oIRI

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 07 2022