Anti Agile Movement - Speaker Deck

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A response to the haters NED LOWE 22nd March 2024 Anti-Agile Movement A lot of internet chatter about how agile failed

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Do they want waterfall? Some do, but it’s rare “Requirements shouldn’t change” 2

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Side point: Amusing how good many of those complaining have it Many people still work in environments with non-stop project meetings 3

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Actually people aren’t complaining about agile It’s SCRUM People rarely disagree with the Agile Manifesto 4

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Scrum is big business 5

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But do the critics have a point? What are the arguments? 6

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Too many meetings & ceremonies 15-20% of the sprint 7

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When do you talk to the users? 8 Stakeholders are often annoyed at the ambiguity

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Do roadmaps really shift every two weeks? 9

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Story points are confusing “Thinking story points equal man-days is like measuring the ocean's depth with a ruler—it might give you numbers, but it misses the essence of the sea's vast mysteries.” Plus we all know extra items are added to the sprint 10

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External dependencies mean tickets roll from sprint to sprint And once that’s normalised, it’s hard to unwind 11

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A lot of organizations drift into Kanban 12

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A New Way SURGE SPRINTS Removing some of the Scrum overhead 13

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Two weeks is too short 37 Signal’s “ShapeUp” methodology uses Six Week Blocks 14 Enough time to achieve something meaningful

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Stand-Ups Reimagined Async chat update every day Team discussion twice weekly including product owner That’s enough 15

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Formal User Feedback Session More than just a demo User driven and feedback captured 16

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Very clear definition of done 17 One week design sprint if not able to articulate

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Frequent releases Minimise Work in Progress Feature Flags CI/CD 18

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Engineer-led prioritisation The six week block & deﬁnition of done allows for this 19 Product team sets vision!

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Surge Sprints We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. 20