Agile Anti-Patterns

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Estimating   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

In this new series, we look at some common problems that Agile teams face, and the common “solutions” that rarely seem to work and often make things worse. Sometimes we need to avoid the well-worn path. Let’s start with the misguided attempt to directly translate story points to effort hours.

The Agile Manifesto was written 13 years ago, which is old enough for it to have gone through several full cycles of development and improvement.  Agile has become an industry unto itself, and has spawned several sub-methodologies that all adhere to the tenets of the original manifesto while altering the manner in which that happens.  It has also been around long enough for not only best practices to be uncovered and documented, but plenty of bad practices, too. In this new series, we take a look at the concept of an anti-pattern, and how some of them have crept into the world of Agile over the past decade.

I am personally fascinated with the idea of anti-patterns. The earliest reference that I can find to the concept is in the book of the same name, Anti-Patterns, by Brown, Malveau, McCormick and Mowbray from 1998. It is a fun read from a group of experienced creators, who have clearly seen their fair share of software projects, and have no problem telling the truth about their experiences. If you’ve ever been in a discussion and found yourself saying, “Yeah…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.