“Fun” Things You Hear from Agile Teams
When you’re feeling like your efforts to lead an agile organization are going sideways, realize you’re not alone!
Several members of the Agile Mentors Community recently shared their stories of some things they’ve heard their agile teams say that are so not agile that they are just plain funny.
We hope this hilarious commentary will brighten up your day.
It’s all about how well I can control the team.
A technical lead recently told me, “I need control!” He is lobbying a director to have “control” over the team, because, as he put it, his inability to control the team is the reason they are not meeting sprint commitments.
Another team member reported that a development manager dropped by his desk by every 30 minutes “just to check on his progress.”
We call it agile, therefore we’re agile.
I’m working on an agile transformation right now and they’ve started labeling everything new agile. We now have agile chairs, agile tables and even agile lamps.
If I go to my company’s training website, it has an entry called agile communication with topics such as “Making yourself approachable,” “Do we have a failure to communicate?” and “Asserting yourself in the workplace.”
Maybe the thinking is if we just say the word enough, we’ll magically become agile?
We don’t need no stinkin’ meetings.
I overheard my team say, “We don’t need daily meetings and retrospectives. We talk all the time.”
We’re good enough.
Our team was 99 percent perfect last sprint. We don’t need any action items or improvements for next sprint.
Testing within a sprint is impossible.
My team proclaimed, “testing is impossible,” and increased its sprint length from two to four weeks.
I told them, imagine if you challenged two people to “prepare and eat a meal in 5 minutes.” The first person decides to create and eat a three-course meal in that five-minute period: an arugula salad to start, followed by filet mignon and potatoes au gratin, then ending with red velvet cake for dessert. As you might expect, when his five minutes are up, he’s only managed to make the salad and season the steak. Miserable, he proclaims, “ “There’s no way to make anything and eat it in just 5 minutes. I need more time!”
Meanwhile, the woman next to him whips up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk and chows it down. All in 4 minutes and 15 seconds.
It’s not that your sprints are too short--it’s that your stories are too big.
Another AMC member shared this comment: “It seems like we need to get things done earlier in the sprint to leave time for QA testing, but then we’re not sure what the team will be doing…”
I have an urgent request.
A lead from another team barged in and announced that there is something pressing that needs to be planned for the next sprint.
I informed him that the team would plan according to the priority articulated in the product backlog, and that if there is something urgent and pressing he should work with the product owner to get the backlog prioritized accordingly.
But here is the fun part…
The product owner who was in the room said, “The product backlog? Where do I find that?”
A stakeholder just told our team, “I need this change made for a customer and told them it would be ready by next week. Since we use agile it isn’t a problem to change up what we’re doing this sprint to accommodate this. It’s a quick easy project---I know you can slip it in.”
Slip it in. Oy!
I can change my mind a lot because we’re agile.
I love hearing from the product owner, “Being agile means I can change my mind a lot.”
It’s not a team decision.
Scrum Master email: “Team, I’m changing Daily Scrum to 9:30.”
Team member reply email: “I thought we settled on 11:30. Did the team agree to this?”
Director of Software Development email reply: “Dear [Team Member], it’s not really a team decision.”
What? The time for the team’s Daily Scrum is not a team decision?
Retrospectives outcomes are for managers to review.
Operations Manager to Scrum Master: “Provide me the meeting minutes and action items from your retrospective.”
Clearly no trust for the team here.
We can’t really start Scrum because….
Management said the other day, “Exciting news, we are going to work in sprints, but we really can’t do Scrum or Agile because we have a mainframe.”
To me that’s sort of like saying that we can’t mow the lawn because we own a refrigerator. Real inside the box thinking!!!
One team told us, “We’ve got three months worth of technical debt to burn down before we can even start thinking about adopting Scrum.”
Here is how you should do your work.
Our Scrum Master spent 2.5 hours going through each item he was adding to the sprint and dictating exactly how to code each one, with an occasional “are you writing this down?”
We should have more work in progress.
My team argued, “OK. We know we carried over a lot of work from last sprint, but it’s almost done. So, why can’t we have three stories each to work on at a time again?”
To join the conversation or to laugh along with us at all the things teams say (and a whole lot more), join the Agile Mentors Community. Visit www.agilementors.com for more information on membership.