Agile Rollouts Fail Developers

  Agile   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

Agile vendors have done a good job providing project managers and product owners with planning and tracking tools. But the primary creators of project deliverables are software developers, and they have consistently been an afterthought. To scale across the enterprise, Agile work processes must embrace the individual contributors doing the actual work.

Agile development is at a crossroads. Practices hardened around small teams of motivated enthusiasts are now being deployed at scale in the enterprise. Average professional software developers, far from the Scrum rock stars or Kanban aficionados, may remain inspired by their Agile training for a couple of months. Then the next release crunch comes, and too often the Agile process is perceived as yet another source of overhead that keeps the developer from coding. Agile practices which have not yet become engrained, even though they are recognized as beneficial, start to fall by the wayside. User stories are not broken down into tasks until the end of a sprint, release frequency drops, the Agile project tracking tool is only kept up-to-date at the insistence of the project manager masquerading as a ScrumMaster. The software development process is once again driven by managerial needs rather than those of the self-organizing team.

The unintended consequence is that the Agile process has degraded into a project …

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