With God as my witness, the next son of a bitch to mention Agile is going to get hurled into the ground so hard that I'm going to publish a seismology paper in Nature with the data.
I. I Personally Find Stand-Ups Very Usefu-
Stop.
Those apologists who insist that Agile works very well for them - you can leave now with my blessing. Half of you have only worked at functional organizations, and you're best off not knowing how most of the world lives. Your precious, pure minds are possibly the tech world's rarest resource, and they must be protected at all costs.
The other half of you are absolutely deluded. All of you, you stay. Greg, lock the doors.
Which absolute fucking maniac in this room decided that the most sensible thing to do in a culture where everyone has way too many meetings was schedule recurring meetings every day? Don't look away. Do you have no idea how terrible the average person is at running a meeting? Do you? How hard is it to just let people know what they should do and then let them do it. Do you really think that, if you hired someone incompetent enough that this isn't an option, that they will ever be able to handle something as complicated as software engineering?
I am telling you right now, the average 15-minute stand-up runs for 30-60 minutes, every fucking day, and absolutely jack shit is accomplished, other than everyone delaying work until the stand-up is over.
"But I really think that my team benefits from -"
Since I just excused our dear, dear unicorn-minded developers from this event, you must live amongst the rest of us, the unwashed masses that turn up every day to blearily mutter "No blockers" around a mouthful of life-restoring caffeine in the desperate hope that this accursed meeting might end even a minute sooner.
No one else finds this meeting useful. Let me repeat that again. No one else finds this meeting useful. We're either going to do the work or we aren't going to do the work, and in either case, I am going to pile-drive you from the top rope if you keep scheduling these.
II. It's Only Ten Min-
No, it overwhelmingly isn't. And even if it was ten minutes, the average manager is clearly incapable of running these things in a way that isn't infantilizing, and despite the fact that I am clearly throwing a tantrum, presumably some of the people reading this are adults that won't tolerate any amount of this.
And that's ignoring all the retros that result in nothing, and grooming the backlog that we'll never clear and Christ, just stop.
III. But We Have To Work Through The Backlog-
What goddamn fantasy land do you live in and how do I get in? I'm going to explain this very slowly in the desperate hopes that you can understand something that isn't on a Confluence page if it is delivered at a sufficiently glacial pace, and if you demonstrate sufficient comprehension, I will refrain from operating this guillotine.
Work must go out. Faster than it goes in. Do you understand?
If your backlog is getting bigger, then work is going into it faster than it is going out. Why is that happening? Fuck if I know, but it is probably totally unrelated to not doing Agile well enough.
You're agreeing to everything because your stakeholders are whiny children with a deficient understanding of business and no one can say no to them. The team has made so many bad technical decisions that any speed is impossible, and if this is the case, I am willing to bet that you've got some spreadsheets in there, you absolute animal. Your engineers don't have brains that work good. I don't know, but Agile isn't going to help.
High Output Management was the most highly-recommended management book I could find that wasn't an outright textbook. Do you know what it says at the beginning? Probably not, because the kind of person that I am forced to choke out over their love of Agile typically can't read anything that isn't on LinkedIn. It says work must go out faster than it goes in, and all of these meetings obviously don't do either of those things.
IV. Bu-
I don't even know what you're going to say, but let me stop you right there, because what the fuck is up with all of these meetings if we're using Jira or whatever all day?
I had to explain our industry to a non-engineer the other day, and they looked at me like I was crazy. I didn't even rant, I did it in the polite, unassuming manner that a genteel corporate drone might employ, and they still didn't understand it.
Why do you have to have the daily meetings if all the details are supposed to be on the cards?
I didn't have an answer for them because there is no answer.
Do you know how people do work in other industries? They go do the work and talk to their colleagues if they need to. The most productive I've ever been was when I just sat down and fixed the problem with smart people when it made sense to do so, and I have never produced anything of value in any other context.
V. But We Need To Know How Much Work Will Get Done!
Oh, fuck off. Go visit Jira right now, look at a burndown chart or something, and you tell me how that's working out for you.
Here's some neat intel - I've been attending conferences this year, and whenever I get the chance, I ask people to see what percentage of their estimated workload gets done every sprint. It is always about half. From banks to hospitals to fintech to whatever, it's half, and I am practically drowning in stressed-out managers trying to figure out how they can do Agile better. That'll make the numbers come out better!
We need stand-ups every other day! The retro format isn't correct! We aren't doing planning poker the right way! We need Agile training!
I am going to uppercut you so hard that I will spend the next two months recovering from the fractures in my hand.
If the problem is one of estimation, then commit to half as much work and see what happens. If you run out of work to do, you can always throw more things on there. If you haven't even tried this, the most obvious thing on the planet, then you are in a cult and only you can save yourself. You have outsourced your thinking to people that don't have brains.
We're at the point where I can infer ten thousand things about a team's operational capacity by just asking if their manager talks about being more Agile, and they're all bad. And don't get me wrong, this is like a superpower because it means I can poach your best engineers whenever I want! All I have to do is say "Hey, I'm not going to fuck with you while you're trying to do something fulfilling" and they will beg me to arrange a role, so by all means, just keep going if that's fine with you.
VI. What Do I Do Instead?
You see, the problem is actually totally unrelated to Agile. The problem is really that most of these people are not good at their jobs. The part of the human mind that is supposed to recognize patterns and make plans has been utterly calcified somehow, and is only capable of repeating the same moves over and over. They would fail to manage with any methodology, and the thing I object to is that they've chosen to fail in a way that inconveniences other people.
If you're going to insist on overpromising and otherwise being utterly incompetent, just choose to do it with a method that doesn't involve all the meetings and ceremony. Like, literally just join a more considerate cult and we won't have to do pistols at sunset. This is a very good offer! You don't even have to start being useful!
The secret is that there's no secret for doing things correctly.
You have to hire the correct people, motivate them to continue working even when there's no clear risk of being fired, make them feel valued and appreciated, not waste their time, ensure they've got the space to do work the right way, only accept the right work, and then just leave them the hell alone. If they have brains, they'll figure everything else out themselves. Does that sound really hard? Yeah, that's why some random engineer can post an unhinged rant about organizations being useless at accomplishing trivial goals and 100,000 other engineers just agree.
The three best managers I've ever worked for, with the most productive teams (at large organizations, so don't even start on the excuses about scale) just let the team work and were there if I needed advice or a discussion, and they afforded me the quiet dignity of not hiring clowns to work alongside me.
If you have to clutch their hands through the process, you will only be dragging them to the ink-black depths of the icy ocean alongside you when I finally find you.
VII. Inarticulate Drowning Sounds
Epics and stories also have stupid names.