The thing was, ‘The Business’ weren’t sure about agile, and the scrum master had regular fights to run things that way. The problems were textbook:
- Resistance to addition of work mid-sprint
- Lack of oversight – is dev X really taking this long to finish story Y? How do we know it’s not already finished, and now they’re just playing Minesweeper?
- Lack of ‘precise’ answers to questions like “On exactly what date will this massive new piece of work be delivered?”
So a little under a year ago, they parted ways with the scrum master. People began filtering into the room to talk to devs about their work. Devs were called into meetings to discuss when and how they were going to fix issues they were in the middle fixing. Refactoring started to be second-guessed by non-devs, and was eventually banned. Two months went by with enforced overtime.
.. Well-run agile teams can produce great results, but even now – 15 years after the Agile Manifesto – it’s often viewed with suspicion. If you like agile practice you can make efforts to sell it, but people hate change, and you have to know when to move on. Some devs like regimented, waterfall environments, so if those environments and devs find each other, everyone’s happy. You spend too much time at work to stay somewhere if you’re not enjoying it.