This is not agile in any sense that I recognize. The first value in the agile manifesto is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools." Yet, Scalable Agile appears to be completely about processes and tools. In fact, I don't see a single reference to actual, direct interaction between two people in the entire article. I particularly dislike this quote:
> Code management tools were neglected in the last generation of agile methodologies, which focused on interactions between people. However, the reality is that managing code is a lot easier than managing people.
Managing people is hard, let's go shopping!
Going agile doesn't mean that a team replaces its managers with automated tools. Kind of the opposite, actually. "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." That's also from the manifesto. It means you should be talking more, not less. Don't write an email to get someone's help, go talk to them. Don't file a ticket to express a requirement, go talk to somebody. Don't sit around rearranging stories in a backlog in order to convey priorities, stand up and tell people what the priorities are. Push decisions down. Talk to people. Let them self-organize. Don't force feed them a backlog of "stories" like cows in a factory farm.
True story, I once worked in an "agile shop" where my direct supervisor told me that there was no assigned seating, but I couldn't sit at this unoccupied table, I had to sit at that adjacent one, because that's where the developers sat. Also his seat was reserved, so don't sit there. And that was nearly the only time he ever spoke to me. So I have kind of a beef concerning "agile" shops with shitty management.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 12.6 ms ] thread> Code management tools were neglected in the last generation of agile methodologies, which focused on interactions between people. However, the reality is that managing code is a lot easier than managing people.
Managing people is hard, let's go shopping!
Going agile doesn't mean that a team replaces its managers with automated tools. Kind of the opposite, actually. "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." That's also from the manifesto. It means you should be talking more, not less. Don't write an email to get someone's help, go talk to them. Don't file a ticket to express a requirement, go talk to somebody. Don't sit around rearranging stories in a backlog in order to convey priorities, stand up and tell people what the priorities are. Push decisions down. Talk to people. Let them self-organize. Don't force feed them a backlog of "stories" like cows in a factory farm.
True story, I once worked in an "agile shop" where my direct supervisor told me that there was no assigned seating, but I couldn't sit at this unoccupied table, I had to sit at that adjacent one, because that's where the developers sat. Also his seat was reserved, so don't sit there. And that was nearly the only time he ever spoke to me. So I have kind of a beef concerning "agile" shops with shitty management.