What do you use that does lead to a good piece of software?
You need to communicate with stakeholders then, to change requirements, explain mistakes, set new goals, and reprioritize tasks. Agile (SCRUM/Kanban/etc.) are designed with frequently changing requirements in mind. In SCRUM, this is done at sprint review/sprint planning stage. In Kanban, it's continuous process.
Just as product requirements can change, so can the way we work. Just like there is not one singular product that solves everybody’s needs, there isn’t necessarily one process that does that either.
I kid, but I think the early proponents of Scrum and similar were trying to achieve a loose framework to do exactly what you’re talking about. The modern incarnations of these can be horrific, but the original intent was always to empower teams to make their own process. Ahh well.
Like so many good ideas (democracy, constitutions), you only really know how well they function once people are actively trying to subvert them. Scrum et.al. have failed in the face of corporatocracy. I honestly don’t know if decentralised structures (i.e. teams empowered to run themselves), can ever survive in large corporates. Which is a pity. Cities grow, but companies die. You have to jump off the dying colossus to find the new company that hasn’t yet succumbed.
The team is self-organizing but person X is the decision maker in the process.
There is an engineering manager, but they will get overruled by person X more often than not.
The framework is simple, but person X will add new rules.
Agile/Scrum says people must understand the domain, but person X is the only one talking to stakeholders since engineers are "not people persons".
I don’t think that’s why they exist, but I do think the structure is not robust to a large number of dysfunctions. This one included.
But bad on agile for letting charlatans co-opt the term.
What's "by the book" agile? Scrum? The things in the manifesto? Something that some rando Scrummaster said?
And who is micromanaging? Both the Agile Manifesto and Scrum are about "self-organizing" teams. If someone is micromanaging, how is that self-organizing?
> What's "by the book" agile? Scrum? The things in the manifesto?
Definitely scrum.
> And who is micromanaging? Both the Agile Manifesto and Scrum are about "self-organizing" teams. If someone is micromanaging, how is that self-organizing?
Every single detail and aspect of your work is determined by someone or something else. You have zero individual autonomy, zero individual responsibility. And zero option to do something good or bad. "Self-organizing" just means that scrum master or coach or whoever is creating set of rules that dictate pretty much every aspect of work.
Yeah, it is not one person telling you how to do things. It is that every aspect of work is decided by someone else or some committee. When you have one person telling you how to do things you at least can adjust to them and negotiate some space with them.
See, this is already not "by the book" Scrum.
The team decides those things in a retrospective, and as long as they are releasing in a reasonable timely manner, it's alright.
If someone is being unreasonable and putting their foot down too much, then it's a management issue that doesn't have anything to do with Scrum. Either the person is a dictator, or they don't have authority and there's no management to put an end to it.
Scrum also doesn't work when the team is burning in a building on fire, but we don't blame Scrum for that.
I'm all for shitting on it, but those problems have been happening in companies for millenia. Scrum won't fix them, you gotta fix each separate problem by itself.
The Agile Manifesto was just a bunch of people who were already doing XP, Scrum or some other lightweight process getting together and writing down the similarities between what they were doing. It's a blanket term invented to describe a variety of different processes, not an actual process.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck
You can use SCRUM/Kanban/SaFE/LeSS, hybrid or other Agile methodology, or no process at all, but it will not help when people are not trained to be proper part of the process.
For example, a PM may replace SCRUM meeting with a status meeting, because it makes his job easier, while PM or other M should not attend a SCRUM meeting at all, unless called in by engineers. The proper moment for interaction between PM and engineer are beginning/end of a ticket, sprint review, and sprint planning.
2) Look at the current state.
3) Decide what the product needs from you.
4) Do that.
5) Use git.
Steps 2 and 3 may involve communication. Step 5 is tracking changes. Have a PM that tracks main things people are working on and estimated dates (not dictated dates).
This is how my current job works and we are unbelievably productive.
And IMO it also implies things like CI/CD.
A process is a hardcoded way of do thing, which is deficient because it cannot react to an ever-changing world
A better way to handle things is by defining "what" should be done, not "how" it should be done
Everything you do -up to and including taking a leak- is a sort of process. Perhaps you don't think that particular example should be a corporate process, but that's not my problem :-P .
You can compose processes to get things done.
Processes can be made mutable or flexible by eg. incorporating decisions or iteration. Especially iterated processes can be very powerful (you can get a lot done with them).
Thinking of things in terms of processes instead of in terms of component steps each time frees your mind to worry about other stuff.
Compare it with dividing a program into functions. Once you've wrapped a task in a function, you can then design using the function, rather than worry about how to write the code from scratch each time. Same with process thinking: you don't have to get bogged down in particulars all the time.
That said, maybe you're thinking of the "Befehlstaktik" vs "Auftragstaktik" [1] approach to doing things. In which case we're arguing definitions instead (which can be easily resolved).