The Worst Agile Mistake I Ever Saw

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Look, most software developers do not like Agile. Estimating your work, when you’ve never done that particular task before, doesn’t make any sense at all.

”How long to create a Snaglepuss? 

I don’t even know what that is. 

What do you mean T-shirt size it?”

Yet I think I’ve found the fatal mistake, which is destroying good software development at my company.

It’s probably not the one you think.

It’s Huge teams

I’m on a call with 19 people right now. Nobody can keep track of what is going on.

I actually don’t know what most of the people do in my current team. People move from one team to another and oftentimes fail to give their status update in the morning as they are with the ‘other’ team at that time.

“Effectively even if you were interested in what was happening in the wider team, the setup kills any enthusiasm you might have had”

Worse stand-up status meetings go on for a half-hour each and every morning. That means I spend 2.5 hours every week not listening to my colleagues. 

“Sure, I should be listening to my workmates. I don’t. I’m really interested whether you do”

I guess I should be grateful for our status ceremony. All our agile ceremonies overrun. People often come off mute in our mainly remote team and ask ‘sorry, what was the question’.

“It doesn’t matter to me. I write Medium articles during them.”

It’s not getting better

Across the industry, I see the same problems regularly coming up. Recently I had a first-stage interview and the recruiter happily shared that

“Our team's size numbers 15 people”

I hope they read this blog post. I think I’ve got the solution.

The Secret Developer’s Solution

A single team should be a single team, no more and no less. That team should be as large as it needs to be to get the work done, no more and no less.

“How hard can it be?“

Conclusion

I need to change my career. Is anyone up for training a welder with no experience?