Anyone in IT/software development today - are you doing Agile yet?

[Zeze]

Agile was the hotcake that everyone made fun of 5 years ago. It looks like Agile methods have become the norm. All the previous concerns and jokes about Agile are mostly gone now (also enterprise agility that is SAFe).

Just curious.

I know several major companies have successfully transitioned. Walmart is trying again. HomeDepot is doing it. Cigna has gone full Agile.

As a consultant, I have a bird's eyeview a bit.

How's agile framework (scrum, kanban, safe, xp, devops) in your area?

 

[nakedfrog]

I thought everyone made fun of it 10-15 years ago (mostly in that companies said they did it, but the implementation was never particularly robust or... accurate).
Yes, we use it, with scrums and kanban, with JIRA.

 

[Zeze]

I thought everyone made fun of it 10-15 years ago (mostly in that companies said they did it, but the implementation was never particularly robust or... accurate).
Yes, we use it, with scrums and kanban, with JIRA.

is it a large company? Do you do quarterly planning for committing your epics/stories?

 

[nakedfrog]

is it a large company? Do you do quarterly planning for committing your epics/stories?

The company itself is large, but I was in an extremely small team (matter of fact, the last two years I was the only remaining developer), we held grooming sessions on an as-needed basis. Moving to a different team now, but still in the transitory phases so I'm not sure how it's going to play out after that.

 

[brianmanahan]

i thought everyone's been using it for the last 10 years at least

 

[purbeast0]

You are late to the party dude.

I've been doing Agile regularly since 2012 and at that time it had already been common place but the prior company I was with was doing waterfall.

 

[Aikouka]

Yes, we do SAFe Agile with all the fun stuff like Program Increment planning.

I've done Agile a few times in the past, but I was never a huge fan of it, because it was largely someone in middle-management that was a fan of Agile, but they never convinced the higher-ups to truly get on board. So, we'd end up with trying to take the Waterfall approach and convert it into Agile at some point ("Agilefall"). Honestly, it never really worked out well because you need that true sense of increment objectives with a proper priority (business value) assigned to them.

 

[ultimatebob]

The company that I work for now is too disorganized for Agile. Instead of doing sprints, we just work on the "top" priority project my manager deems is the "top" priority that week. It seems to change weekly. Sometimes it changes mid-week, and sometimes we have three simultaneous "top" priority projects. Those weeks are always fun.

 

[Zeze]

The company that I work for now is too disorganized for Agile. Instead of doing sprints, we just work on the "top" priority project my manager deems is the "top" priority that week. It seems to change weekly. Sometimes it changes mid-week, and sometimes we have three simultaneous "top" priority projects. Those weeks are always fun.

That's very interesting.

Our PMs have no power in my company (and I am one).

Engineers usually call the shots since they know what they're talking about. Product owners have varying levels of technical expertise.

 

[purbeast0]

The company that I work for now is too disorganized for Agile. Instead of doing sprints, we just work on the "top" priority project my manager deems is the "top" priority that week. It seems to change weekly. Sometimes it changes mid-week, and sometimes we have three simultaneous "top" priority projects. Those weeks are always fun.

That sounds super unorganized man.

When I came onto this one project as the lead UI dev, they had zero process and once I implemented a 2 week agile process, the other people involved were like "THIS IS FUCKING GREAT!" lol. Just having some structure like that helped a lot.

 

[ultimatebob]

The last place I worked at used Agile, mostly because the manager of the team believed in the product.

The manager at my new place is ex-military, and it shows. Every week is a battle against some poorly thought out project with an unreasonable deadline.

 

[Zeze]

The company that I work for now is too disorganized for Agile. Instead of doing sprints, we just work on the "top" priority project my manager deems is the "top" priority that week. It seems to change weekly. Sometimes it changes mid-week, and sometimes we have three simultaneous "top" priority projects. Those weeks are always fun.

Hire me in the future I'll set their asses straight. (If I'm given authority as a coach)

 

[Zeze]

That sounds super unorganized man.

When I came onto this one project as the lead UI dev, they had zero process and once I implemented a 2 week agile process, the other people involved were like "THIS IS FUCKING GREAT!" lol. Just having some structure like that helped a lot.

That must've been awesome. You should sell the hell out of that and I hope you get promoted.

 

[purbeast0]

That must've been awesome. You should sell the hell out of that and I hope you get promoted.

In my space you don't really get promoted like other organizations. I'm a contractor so we're brought on to do stuff. I was brought on to take over a project and lead it. It's a small team though but the all liked the process that I went with.

 

[sdifox]

Wait, there are people not on Agile? Pretty sure I have been in Agile for more than a decade.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm in telecom and we went the "agile" route a few years back. The thing I find silly about this sort of stuff is that it's this huge thing, then a few years later they switch to something else. So much time, effort, and money wasted. The big thing before this was ITIL.

I think it's an agile thing but what I find is in the past few years can't seem to leave things alone when they work. They're constantly changing stuff for sake of change. Different monitoring software, new ticketing system etc. Migrate everything over, then change it to something else, rinse and repeat. Basically, the idea is to implement something that's super crappy and put tons of effort into making it half decent. Once it's half decent, you migrate it to something else - but don't migrate everything, that way the old one still sticks around. This is how we have like 20 different monitoring systems and at least 5 ticketing systems.

Agile is basically corporate #YOLO.

 

[sdifox]

I'm in telecom and we went the "agile" route a few years back. The thing I find silly about this sort of stuff is that it's this huge thing, then a few years later they switch to something else. So much time, effort, and money wasted. The big thing before this was ITIL.

I think it's an agile thing but what I find is in the past few years can't seem to leave things alone when they work. They're constantly changing stuff for sake of change. Different monitoring software, new ticketing system etc. Migrate everything over, then change it to something else, rinse and repeat. Basically, the idea is to implement something that's super crappy and put tons of effort into making it half decent. Once it's half decent, you migrate it to something else - but don't migrate everything, that way the old one still sticks around. This is how we have like 20 different monitoring systems and at least 5 ticketing systems.

Agile is basically corporate #YOLO.

No, that is not the problem caused by Agile, that is just corporate morons.