Agile is Dead :: Pixels Camp 2017

1. Agile is Dead
by Pedro Gustavo Torres

2. Engineering Director @
Agilist since 2010
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer
Pedro Gustavo Torres

3. _pedro_torres
pedrogustavotorres
pedrogustavotorres.com
pedro.gustavo.torres@gmail.com
Pedro Gustavo Torres

4. Pedro Gustavo Torres

5. Pedro Gustavo Torres
2016
2017

6. Agile and Scrum were invented a long time ago

7. Agile and Scrum were invented a long time ago

8. Agile and Scrum were invented a long time ago
The Agile movement started (with the Manifesto) in 2001
Scrum was invented in 1995 by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
2001 1995

9. People talk about it like if it was something new
But it is not!

10. So what is Agile?
“Ability to deliver early value to your customers”

11. And Scrum?
Scrum is a framework based on empiricism: inspection, adaption and
transparency

12. How does this fits together?

13. How does this fits together?
JIRA, Daily Standups...

14. How does this fits together?
JIRA, Daily Standups...
Scrum, XP...

15. How does this fits together?
Scrum, XP...
Behaviour
JIRA, Daily Standups...

16. How does this fits together?
Scrum, XP...
Agility
Behaviour
JIRA, Daily Standups...

17. A picture is worth one thousand words...
Tools & Processes, Practices
Principles, Values, Mindset

18. Beware of the Cargo Cult

19. Beware of the Cargo Cult

20. What is the current adoption of Agile?
94% of adoption?

21. I find it hard to believe

22. Why I don’t believe in that?

23. Born Agile

24. Agile Transition

25. Agile Transition
We are Agile!

26. Typical Agile opposing force
Boss
Manager
Manager Manager
Dev Dev Dev Dev Dev

27. Typical Agile opposing force
Boss
Manager
Manager
Manager
Dev
Dev
Dev
Dev
Dev

28. Typical Agile opposing force
M I D D L E M N G E M E N T

29. Questionable Agile
Bad Agile
Crappy Agile
frAgile
Dark Scrum

30. Questionable Agile
Let’s look again to the manifesto
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
Responding to Change over Following a Plan

31. Questionable Agile
Let’s look again to the manifesto
Left Side Agile Right Side Agile
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
Responding to Change over Following a Plan

32. Questionable Agile
Let’s look again to the manifesto
Left Side Agile Right Side Agile
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
Responding to Change over Following a Plan
Bad Agile
Crappy Agile
frAgile
Dark Scrum

33. Right Side Agile
Does your company have a QA team?

34. Right Side Agile
Do your sprint burndowns look like this?

35. Right Side Agile
Do your release burndowns look like this?

36. Right Side Agile
Does your company adopts XP practices (e.g. Pair Programming)?
How about CI / CD pipelines?
How long does it take to put in production one single line of code through your
normal development life cycle?

37. Right Side Agile
Are you a JIRA slave?
- Daily Standups without a physical whiteboard
- Daily Standups in front of a TV
- Retrospectives in front of your laptop so that you can
write the confluence page

38. Right Side Agile
Do you have dependencies between teams in order to get stuff delivered?

39. Right Side Agile
Do your teams have Autonomy?
What is the Purpose of your teams?
How about Mastery?

40. Right Side Agile
Do your teams have Autonomy?
What is the Purpose of your teams?
How about Mastery?
Intrinsic
Motivation

41. Right Side Agile
Are you afraid of having your velocity dropped?
Or afraid of not having 100% sprint completeness (story points delivered vs
committed)?
Do you have managers asking to close untested user stories just because the
graphs need to “look good”.

42. Right Side Agile
Are you afraid of having your velocity dropped?
Or afraid of not having 100% sprint completeness (story points delivered vs
committed)?
Do you have managers asking to close untested user stories just because the
graphs need to “look good”.
1. Psychological safety
The five keys to a successful Google team

43. Right Side Agile
Do you know the velocity of your teams?
Is the velocity per person or per team?

44. Right Side Agile
How many of you still estimate in time (e.g. days, hours)?
Or have points directly translated into time (e.g. 1 point equals to 1 day)?
Do you know if points means time, complexity, effort or potatoes?
Have you ever heard of the #NoEstimates movement?

45. Right Side Agile
Are the developers:
- making their own releases?
- supporting their applications in live?
- doing on-call?

46. Right Side Agile
Are your performance reviews just at the individual level?

47. Right Side Agile
Do you manage the resources or the flow?

48. Right Side Agile
Are you just being Agile in Engineering? What about the rest of the company?
Where is the learning fast and improve? How long do you need to wait to get
customer's feedback?

49. Right Side Agile
Some of the guys that are “out and about” Agile... don't know as much as they say
Haven't you heard:
- "It depends"
- "Agile is something that you feel"
- “Fail fast, fail cheap”
- “Celebrate failure”
- “We are Agile… we don’t have deadlines”
- “I’m not here to give you answers”

50. No wonder some folks announced Agile’s “death”
Agile is Dead… Long live continuous delivery
Agile is Dead… Long live code reviews

51. No wonder some folks announced Agile’s “death”
Agile is Dead… Long live continuous delivery
Agile is Dead… Long live code reviews
But they don’t
make any sense

52. eXtreme Programming “belongs” to Agile

53. But we also saw some legit “deaths”
Agile is Dead… Long live Lean
Agile is Dead… Long live Waterfall

54. So why is Agile Dead?

55. Or at least Walking Dead?

56. We completely missed the purpose
Peeps usually mistake Agile with Scrum:
- Scrum is just a practice (e.g. Sprints, Retrospectives)... While Agile is a
mindset
The majority is just focusing on the Process and not on the Output and the
Outcome
We are missing the “Whys”

57. We completely missed the purpose
Developers aren't happy
Customers aren’t happy
Support isn’t happy
Product isn’t happy
We struggle to deliver value to our customers
No executive understands the metrics usually provided

58. We completely missed the purpose
Developers aren't happy
Customers aren’t happy
Support isn’t happy
Product isn’t happy
We struggle to deliver value to our customers
No executive understands the metrics usually provided
Remember: We are
uncovering better
ways of developing
software...

59. What are we measuring anyway?

60. What are we measuring anyway?
8º
12º
20º
21º
22º
23º

61. How many changes have you seen lately
On your processes?
On your practice?
On your values and principles?
On your mindset?

62. Which makes me wonder
Why are most of the companies so rigid with their Agile practices?
Where is the agility? Or are we Agile regarding everything except the practice
itself?

63. Popcorn Time Flow for Experimentation

64. Do you believe Scrum is enough?

65. Do you believe Scrum is enough?

66. Do you believe Scrum is enough?

67. Do you believe Scrum is enough?
Agile

68. Do you believe Scrum is enough?
Scrum
Agile

69. At the end of the day
Who cares if we are doing sprints... If we don't get any sh*t done?
Don’t forget that the purpose is to deliver software… not to do Scrum, sprints or to
follow a process

70. What about certifications?
Who here holds a Scrum Alliance’s certification?
It just means that you or your company had around 1000 euros to pay for a two or
three days training
Even the lowest-cost Scrum Alliance course brings its instructor from $3000 to
$5000, which is pretty decent pay for two or three days’ work

71. Just before the final thoughts… three (small) notes:
1 - Agile doesn’t mean Microservices
2 - DevOps is not a role… it’s a culture
3 - If you are not Google, Netflix or Amazon don’t fall into the cargo cult... just
because you imitate them you shouldn’t expect to get the same sort of results

72. So what is NOT the goal of Agile?
- Self promotion
- Fat bank accounts
- Bullshit
- Micromanagement
- Dogmas
- Religion
- Silver Bullets
- Fad
- Trend
- Impress your better half
- ...

73. So what is the goal of Agile?
To have Happy:
- Customers
- Developers
- Stakeholders
- Executives
- Office managers
- HR
- Finance
- Cleaning Ladies
- ...

74. Start with “Individuals and interactions”
We have a lot to learn with machines... Just go back to 1981 and take a look at the
Robustness principle (or Postel's law)​ regarding TCP implementations

75. Thank you!
AGILE