I'll use this as an opportunity to vent about agile. It promises developers a larger voice, but in my experience, it heavily favors management and product management types, since they are usually the ones in control of the ticketing/tracking systems. They aren't under the sprint deadlines that developers are, so they are able to better organize and build their cases for what gets done. Even if developers can build a case, it often gets sent to the bottom of the backlog. Developers are forced to take on technical debt due to the short-term product oriented thinking. Is this because of the design of agile, or just the misapplication? Considering it's a cargo-cult management technique, I think it is part of the design.
2 week sprint deadlines are entirely too short. say there's a larger project, it takes a lot of overhead to split everything up into neat 2-week releasable pieces. After the slicing and dicing, the big picture gets lost and garbled, adding more stress to developers.
Third, and most importantly, it offloads responsibility and ownership from management (especially upper management) onto lower level employees. Why should managers do their job if agile teams are "self organizing" and "self managing"?
On top of this, I'm not convinced product or business types are better able to design a good product than most developers are.
My favorite is when I take the time to break something management puts tasks 4, 6, and 10 into the sprint because the hours fit. Disregarding any dependencies or natural order.
I think the real problem is that we, as a society, have lost the ability to manage. Agile being associated with these problems is a symptom, not the cause. It won't fix bad developers and it won't fix bad management. But if the developers and management are good, then it can work fine.
2 week sprint deadlines are entirely too short. say there's a larger project, it takes a lot of overhead to split everything up into neat 2-week releasable pieces. After the slicing and dicing, the big picture gets lost and garbled, adding more stress to developers.
Third, and most importantly, it offloads responsibility and ownership from management (especially upper management) onto lower level employees. Why should managers do their job if agile teams are "self organizing" and "self managing"?
On top of this, I'm not convinced product or business types are better able to design a good product than most developers are.