That Untold Sprint Fiction. How Agile Encourages the Lazy

Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

Agile methodologies were sold to us as the savior of software development. A framework that promised to revolutionize the way we build and deliver software.

“The pertinent question isn’t has anything gone wrong? It’s what has gone wrong?

We can then seriously think about what needs to change.”

How long?

Agile has offered us many advantages as software developers. The most important of these is it isn’t waterfall. How we work in Agile has its own problems and one of these issues is the estimation of work.

“When the bar is so low as not being waterfall is enough the alarm bells should have rung loud.

Once upon a time, in a not-so-far-off tech landscape, I worked in a team that embraced Agile like a religion. Stand-ups, sprints, retrospectives — you name it, we did it. But beneath the surface of this well-oiled Agile machine, lurked a beast we often ignored: overestimation.

My colleague worked to always give himself some extra time. Drinking in a bar one night he shared this with me. If it should take a day he’ll quote two. If it should take two days he’ll say three and so on.

I told him that he sucked resources from the team. He wasn’t that bothered.

I think you can imagine why I no longer work for that company.”

The root of the problem

Agile is great, in so far as we didn’t have big bang projects exploding like waterfall. Yet we go headfast into production with half-baked ideas. Estimation seems to be no exception to this.

“Estimates could have many uses. Unless you’ve decided as a team what they are for, they’ll probably be misused.

There are a few options here. Efficiency. Productivity. And as our ‘friend’ mentioned it could be to provide a nice cushion for yourself as in laziness and complacency.

If you don’t discuss what estimates are for, you’ll have no consistency. 

We didn’t have any and that allowed this type of laziness to seep into the team. We couldn’t deliver as many features as we should have been able to. The whole team suffered.”

However…

It’s not all doom and gloom. Agile, when executed with discipline and realistic timeframes, can be the wind beneath a project’s wings. The key is in striking the right balance — estimating time that’s neither too tight to strangle creativity nor too loose to foster laziness.

“Which is something I’ve never seen”

Conclusion

Agile is a powerful tool, but only when wielded wisely. It’s time we stopped using it as an excuse for laziness and started using it as a trigger for true efficiency and innovation.

“Which planet are you on?”