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I agree with you that a formalized methodology is required for you to start with agile, be it XP, Scrum, Kanban or whatever the flavor the team itself feels more comfortable doing.

What no one tells these teams is that the methodology/process itself should be flexible, should be allowed to change to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their work environment. What I've noticed helping some small companies is that teams learn some framework and use that as their "agile" concept and then proceed to be overzealous of the process itself, completely forgetting the original manifesto.

Like always, it's a strange whisper game...

Adjusting the process literally is part of Scrum. At the retrospective, if something isn't working, you call it out and change it. That can be something as big as completely changing the methodology. I've never worked on a XP team but my understanding is formally there is no retrospective process - I would definitely want to put one in place if I did work with it.

Any development process that doesn't allow for changing itself is shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating.

Except at most companies that use Scrum, there are very rigid rules sent down from above regarding the implementation of Scrum. These rules apply to the whole company and can't be questioned or changed via retros.

This is definitely the case for me. I work at a reasonably large (~5-7000 total employees) company that had a top-down Agile Mandate imposed about a year ago. It’s worked reasonably well, honestly, but there was a lot of chafing initially, and there’s still some resistance. Problems with the process are occasionally solved by abandoning it entirely, with mixed results.

The thing to be careful of is that a lot of developers also don't like certain parts of agile, and those don't get used. They may have a preference to continue to use long cycle approaches (code reviews) where a shorter cycle approach is now necessary (pair programming). The end result is they pick and choose the bits they want and end up failing to ever do the process even once, not because its impossible but because it isn't their preference. They didn't do it out of knowledge, infact they failed to see the interplay in the processes working together and how the entire thing feeds together to produce the whole.

I think most teams drop agile practices before they have knowledge to show they aren't appropriate, they usually never get used at all. They adopt what they have to because they don't really want to do it at all because they consider a large chunk of it doesn't work.

Changing the process from a position of knowledge and experience on it is one thing, doing it without that knowledge is the more usual thing and its harmful.

>I actually like vanilla Scrum

Scrum has some really serious flaws:

1) It creates a massive disincentive against refactoring technical debt (refactoring stories essentially have to be 'sold' to the product owner).

2) You end up spending more time than is necessary in too-long meetings. Planning should really be done continuously rather than in biweekly meetings.

3) The idea that you should deliver working software every two weeks is outmoded. You should be aiming to deliver potentially shippable increments continuously.

1 the po is the representative of the customer and cares about the long life of the product. Sounds like a role that should care about the future state of the code/product though will obvs want to understand the cost/value of anything that isn't helping the immediate needs

2 planning can be continuous, just every two weeks you look at what you should focus on next, you can still bring stuff into the sprint along the way if everyone agrees

3 you plan to deliver a bundle of value every two weeks (so you can bite off enough to get stuck into, but not so much that you can head in the wrong direction for long) but you can release as soon as the code is ready, no need to wait until the end of sprint.

>the po is the representative of the customer and cares about the long life of the product.

That does not make them qualified to rank and/or write refactoring stories.

IMHO, they should tell the developers how long to spend on refactoring/tooling (e.g. 30% of their time) and developers should figure out themselves how to spend that time.

That isn't scrum, though.

>planning can be continuous, just every two weeks you look at what you should focus on next

That's saying on the one hand that planning both is and is not continuous.

>you plan to deliver a bundle of value every two weeks

I call this mini waterfall. It's a good thing to shoot for if you were y previously doing releases every 3 months. It's not a good thing to shoot for if you were previously doing daily releases.

Sorry, wasn't clear with the value piece, you deliver (to live/the user) each piece/story when it is ready, but have a grouping of items that you want to improve across he sprint. I.e. This sprint we will improve login with this 8 stories

And fully agree the po won't write the refactoring stories, but anyone can write stories. I'm not that technical but I've never worked somewhere where the team wasn't able to talk about the value of tech debt etc and help me understand the value of bringing them in.

>I'm not that technical but I've never worked somewhere where the team wasn't able to talk about the value of tech debt etc

They can talk about it, but under scrum it has to be sold to the PO to get it prioritized. I've worked with plenty of dev teams that could talk but couldn't sell.

And it's the hardest kind of thing to sell, because the benefits are diffuse, abstract and usually long term, whereas feature stories are the exact opposite.

I've seen this whole sales pitch/pushback process fail in lots of places. Techie explains problem to PO in techie terms -> PO's eyes glaze over while they nod their head and agree that this stuff is important -> story keeps getting pushed down the backlog in favor of stories that have a concrete dollar value attached. -> quality suffers as a result.

True, however I'd say this is a problem with having an incompetent person in charge, not a problem with the process. I've had the experience you describe but also the opposite experience where people understood the need to rework things and what the business impact of not doing it will be. What makes a difference are 2 things:

1. The person making a decision like "should we do refactoring" should not be incompetent. They should be technically great and also in tune with the company's business needs. I know some smaller companies have non-technical people in all non-dev roles, so it's either the devs who do the work deciding or a non-technical person deciding, but that is just stupidity, at the very least the guy who is the boss of the development team should be a development guy. I seriously doubt that at for example Microsoft or Google, a non-technical person makes this type of decision.

2. The incentive system should not be messed up. Especially at companies with multiple levels of traditional managers, you have problems like people treating their job almost like a game, where they try to make their numbers good at the end of the year or avoid ever telling their bosses something their bosses don't want to hear... They completely lose alignment with the company's interests and treat their job like a game of looking good to their boss, so even if they understand the need for something they might say no to avoid missing a deadline they told their boss they would hit etc... This doesn't really happen at SD companies because most of them are new and never developed this type of culture but it happens at companies that are in another field and just have a SD department

I also don't think the solution of "30% of time" is good. Sometimes you need more, sometimes less, sometimes it's more important, sometimes less, sometimes more urgent, sometimes less. I still think you should "sell" refactoring to your boss, but the "boss" at a level where "should we refactor" decisions are being made should be an extremely technical guy who also knows how it will affect the business side of the project.

>True, however I'd say this is a problem with having an incompetent person in charge, not a problem with the process.

No, it's a process problem. Devs can't directly assess the relative importance of setting up a CI server compared to the new login workflow. If they could, there wouldn't be any need for a PO. POs probably don't grasp exactly how important setting up a CI server is. And why should they?

>The person making a decision like "should we do refactoring" should not be incompetent.

That's a given. If they're incompetent, no matter what process you give them they will inevitably just make things worse.

>I also don't think the solution of "30% of time" is good. Sometimes you need more, sometimes less, sometimes it's more important, sometimes less, sometimes more urgent, sometimes less.

Yeah, sometimes more, sometimes less depending upon how much pressure customers are putting on you, if the trade show is next week, if it's a quiet week, etc. IMHO PO should choose the % each sprint and devs should choose what goes in it.

>I still think you should "sell" refactoring to your boss

That's tantamount to saying you don't want it to get done, because devs are typically shitty salespeople. Also: do you really care whether module B is decoupled from module A or a new CI server is set up? Why not just say "spend 30% of your time this sprint on code quality improvements" and leave it at that?

At most, the devs should sell the % of time they want each sprint. Honestly though, I'd be happy to let that be 100% at the PO's discretion. Just don't make me try to explain to a non-techie why it's important that I need to refactor some tests.

I think what you don't understand in my post is that I am saying POs should grasp those things.

I just don't see the reasoning behind hiring someone who is non-technical for such a position.

And the answer to "why should they" is precisely because they can then understand the development side better and these types of problems are avoided. It allows them to make more informed decisions. Basically, why should they not?

That’s a list of poor engineer attributes, which need to be addressed via conversations. Not impose a process in the hope that’ll fix them.

The process is a tool you use to address them. You might have worked with more mature engineering organizations than I have and with people that are more professional.

But I've worked with guys who spent most of the time surfing the web or were really territorial with their code. Or teams that were just shitty at communicating with each other so you had frequent misunderstandings or blocking. Or people who said "Yeah, this will be done in a week" and then after one week they say one more week etc.

Some are personal issues that should probably be handled by a boss and some are just shitty engineering practice that could be fixed by conversations (provided someone actually knows good engineering practices). But that also requires people not to get defensive and say that we have always done it this way and it works or become angry because they think you are calling them out.

Instead agreeing about things like these:

1. The work we do is agreed upon by all and is visible on a board or website.

2. Every day in the morning we chat for 15 minutes about how things are going and if we need help.

will fix some of them in my experience and the angry people can whine about the process for a while instead of directing that anger at team mates.

Fair response - my assertions were a bit extreme :-).

You can use process to force change, but, personally, I think a strong manager/leader would aim to resolve these issues irrespective of the process. Also, and I think this is why so many complain about agile, is that it is used to change these types of behaviour and is then seen as ‘the bad _guy_’.

My personal view is that the process should be aligned with your business, not as a tool to fix people challenges.

The 15 min daily catchup is invaluable irrespective of your overall process.

Easier said than done though :).

Happy to talk further and learn from your experiences. Thanks.

> Sometimes some developers feel that they should probably rewrite X or add Y and does so without consulting anyone first.

To be fair, project managers often decide to keep using X or leave out Y without consulting anyone first.

Also, to be fair, project managers are rarely organized or explicit about where the project is and where it should be with respect to cross pollination. If they tracked their goals there like they did other things, you'd see some developers taking this style of project under their wing.

That being said, my experience largely matches yours. Though I find the success rate in setting up a closed feedback loop (actually demoing for the actual people that should be happy with the actually deployed feature) is much lower than people notice, so I'm not sure agile is as technically useful as it seems. It's politically useful, for sure. You can say "Working on the wrong thing? I gave Henderson eight demos as work progressed this fall!"

The developer should consult not just manager, but also (or primary) other developers. Unless you are working in isolated silos (which is fine), every developer should coordinate with others.

And, some of the best products ever created were written without agile. How did we ever manage. I don't like it when people tell an engineer they're wasting the company time because they implemented something no one asked for. Usually, the customer or client needed that and didn't realize it. And, it bites them in the ass later if they don't.

Sure, I'm not saying it is the only methodology to follow or even the best. I'm saying that in my experience it has been a good tool to fix issues like that.

And sure you sometimes know that certain things need to be implemented but it should not be done without anyone else knowing it. At least it should be known and agreed upon with the team and then discussed with or made visible for the product owner/PM/whatever role.