Agile Practices Drawbacks
Companies still need to be mature enough to understand that technical problems are, in fact, business problems. The last thing any Engineering organization wants is for teams to slip into “agile zombie mode,” yet industry-wide, it happens. Do engineers need to complete a checklist for every Pull Request they merge? Do you still need that on-call rotation where engineers acknowledge and silence alerts 99% of the time?
Not all agile practices have been positive. These practices need to be more explicit about the core principles of agile and promote poor management. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace. A sprint is a predefined, repeating window (usually between 1–4 weeks) in which pre-selected tasks must be completed.
Managers play a crucial role in ensuring a team’s success by managing and directing their employees’ work. Bugs and operational issues are often discussed in meetings, and blame may be placed on developers for not moving enough. Managers manage people, and as long as they are in charge, they are happy to have their direct reports working faster. Managers use complete transparency to micromanage developers and push them to work faster.
Managers are defining roadmaps and milestones and requiring developers to estimate the work. Still, they are pushed hard to fit their estimates into the imposed milestones. Product owners do not consider themselves part of the Team and do not share the responsibility when things go wrong. Product owners and managers may only sometimes feel responsible for the Team’s success. We need to consider the process and the people involved in agile transformations. Its philosophy of intolerance to self-examination is present in all its practices.
Managers build the product rather than empower others to make things faster and better. Team members should help each other to identify and solve problems. This approach fosters autonomy and independence, leading to successful and fulfilling outcomes. Managers need to understand the goals and objectives of the Team and the company as a whole.
Software development is unpredictable, and investing too much time upfront on a plan will generate waste. The time to market is extensive, and end-user learning takes too long. Instead of improving collaboration and benefiting from Agility, teams fall back to a waterfall working mode. Agility is all about empiricism and cooperation. It will only work well once teams can embrace uncertainty and are empowered.
SCRUM may have benefits in meeting deadlines and creating a structured approach to managing time, but it also has drawbacks. On the one hand, taking risks and being mindful of the hierarchy within the organization is essential. Walking can be challenging, but this inner conflict drives the manager to be a more effective leader and advocate for their Team.
Teams assigned to these components reduce their ambitions to fix the technical debt. Push back on newcomers’ attempts to settle the debt and ask to get re-assigned elsewhere. The Team exists in a slow creep/boiling frog situation where existing processes have become ineffective. Despite the shortcomings, the Team keeps following the same process. Maintaining the status quo may be more comfortable, but more effective to remove ineffective methods.
Across the engineering industry, it’s common for teams to slip into “agile zombie mode.” The Team spends each morning regurgitating what’s on an Agile board while everyone tunes out. Hours of team time are dedicated to pointing out tickets and debating estimates, but no one is sure who the calculations are for.
Many engineers have been on an agile zombie team before, and we know it sucks. Consider declaring bankruptcy in your process. Only some strategies are meant to exist forever. Restart with minor or even no function, and reincorporate the process pieces that solve pain points that arise.
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[¹]: Robert C. Martin (2019): (Clean Agile: Back to Basics (Robert C. Martin Series))
