Agile

Scrum helped leave waterfall behind. Then it got in the way. It’s 9:57 a.m. and I’m watching someone update a Jira ticket to “In Progress” so they have something to say in the stand-up at 10:00. Welcome to Scrum in the enterprise: a play we all agreed to star in, long after the plot stopped making sense. I’m not here to burn Scrum to the ground. It served its purpose—just not the one it thinks it did. It helped kill off waterfall. It gave developers permission to talk to stakeholders more than once a year. And it introduced the radical idea that shipping working software might be more useful than delivering a 40-page Gantt chart with a straight face. ...

Originally published on September 20, 2022 I was lucky. One of my first real gigs was at a startup that actually understood agile—not just the part where you stand around at 9:30 reciting what you did yesterday. No, I mean real agile. The founder believed in it. Not just the words, but the mindset. And in 2007, that made them look a little unhinged. Estimates in points instead of hours? Delivering small, usable increments? Developers writing tests on purpose? Teams interviewing and hiring their own teammates? It was weird. It was new. And it worked. ...