I once worked at a division of a large company that held daily standups, weekly check-ins, two week sprints, retros, pre-planning, pre-pre-planning, and post-mortems. They had burndown charts and stories and backlogs. A substantial portion of a day was spent in meetings, prepping for meetings, or book-keeping (updating progress charts). There were architecture review boards, security reviews checklists, and manager planning meetings.
And they put out exactly zero products in three years.
When I first joined, I went around and asked everyone what they were doing, why, and how they felt about it. Nobody really knew, but blamed the previous crew who were long gone, and they hated it.
Management takeaway was that things weren’t right, so they hired these high-priced consultants to hold more agile training sessions. A whole week of all tech hands doing nothing but sitting in training. I left the week before it began.
sounds like every goddamn job I’ve had. We did ship stuff, but all the goddamn rituals sucked the soul out of everything.
The best development I did was before agile when you had ownership of a product.
