(2024-09-26) Procopio The Slow Painful Death Of Agile And Jira

Joe Procopio: The Slow, Painful Death Of Agile and Jira. Agile has stopped being agile, so it’s time for Agile to go and take Jira with it.

*Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Software development cycles are taking longer and longer.
Technology teams are growing larger and larger.*

So now I have a question. When did Agile stop being an optional methodology for developing certain types of software and suddenly become an organization-wide religion?

Agile was supposed to be an alternative to existing, cumbersome project management methodologies of the sort that were evolving into credit-earning-factories like PMP and even Six Sigma.

my own personal professional experience with Agile has always been at the periphery

At Automated Insights, circa 2010 to 2017

we were moving too fast for even Agile to keep up

to be fair, we wound up making a lot of unnecessary mistakes at that speed without a methodology

At Spiffy, roughly 2017 to 2022, myself and the CEO and the CTO were actively against all of the formalities of Agile, but in practice, we were using the concepts — continuous development, continuous improvement, continuous deployment — but we didn’t conform to all the mandatory cycles and checkpoints and navel-gazing required to formally adopt it.

At Growers, in 2023, I walked into an org that was essentially crippled by an over-reliance on Agile and all of its formalities

in some sense I’m still working on that fix as I write this, but we’re over the major hurdles, so I can document some of the lessons.

The Primary Problem Is Tech Bloat

Tech bloat is not tech debt — which is a term for inelegance in any development process that results in a build up of problems that crop up later — although tech bloat definitely produces tech debt.

Tech bloat can be identified by a number of symptoms:

The constant assessment and reassessment of deadlines and delivery dates.
The brutal reluctance to start the development process until every detail is documented.
The creeping motivation to begin with the easiest tasks, not the riskiest tasks.

Here’s how tech bloat manifests itself in an organization.

More documentation creeps into the process, tracking not only what was developed and why, but how — and this “how” becomes the focal point of status updates

More deadlines are set at more frequent checkpoints, and they wind up producing micromanagement at every turn and twist of what is essentially a creative process.

Constant second-guessing during the reevaluation periods,

Micro-managing the production, which means that by the time 30 percent or so of the overall feature is finished, it’s no longer a priority. Then the org starts the death spiral of producing what’s on the roadmap

The World Doesn’t Need More Features
It needs lighter software that does the important things better.

This is not a new concept, but it’s one that every methodology eventually wanders away from

And that’s what happened. Agile is now PMP with cute names and shorter meetings with more rules.

So the problem is not the idea of Agile, and it never was. It’s the execution and the lack of leadership to rein it in. It’s a layer of middle management focused on deadlines over utility, cuts over growth, and savings over progress. (Dark Agile)