The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Faux Agile is that Good Men Do Nothing
The U.S. Department of Defence recently published an informative document on How to Detect ‘Agile BS’. The schematic they include in the document is simple and some argue it offers advice to managers on how to fine-tune their projects.
In actual fact the document offers advice, and a set of questions, to everyone on a team. This makes it clear, in my mind, that preventing agile-scrum-fall or faux agile is a shared responsibility, it does not rest squarely on management shoulders.
In terms of context, when reading the document I could not help but wonder how time and again teams (or entire programs of work) remain in the ‘Agile BS’ state.
Surely at some stage, at least some individuals must have harboured thoughts to that effect.
Sadly, in my exeprience, these same invididuals keep quiet - and this is where things start going wrong. As the prolific speaker and author Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) said in one of his presentations, when addressing programmers, “you were hired to say no”.
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