ParaAgile. Some thoughts on what went wrong.

Being agile doesn’t mean „improving” the process by making it more complex, and adding more elements to it. It is not about introducing more tools, timesheets, metrics, velocity charts, review checklists, workflows, sprint capacity plans, controlling your teammates’ every minute at work, and redirecting the focus of your team from product development to bureaucracy development.

Being agile doesn’t mean having a frozen sprint plan with no space for flexibility. It is not about rejecting your customer’s trivial request for two lines of code because your team will be afraid of logging two additional hours of work, destroying a nice and smooth velocity chart.

Being agile doesn’t mean producing rarely opened documentation, „green” quality reports and 100% coverage with unit tests testing nothing actually. Sometimes less but well-thought is better than putting lipstick on a pig.

Being agile means acting accordingly, prioritising tasks, and focusing efforts on what matters the most to your customers and your values.

Being agile means continuously updating a framework that suits your needs, not adjusting yourself to the framework.

Being agile means having all stakeholders involved. The more equally the better.

It seems so trivial. And it seemed when I first read the Scrum Guide and Agile Manifesto over a decade ago with sentences: “Working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is the primary measure of progress.” and “Responding to change over following a plan”. burning into my memory. Yet from what I have been experiencing recently there is an increasing demand for wrapping Agile into a predefined framework, a hardcoded process, twisting the entire essence of it. Like if the main benefit was to convince your potential customers only with “Hey, we do Agile, we do MISRA, we have standards, we care about quality”. Really, do we? At the same time, you can observe more and more articles and YouTube videos on Scrum being ludicrous and the upcoming end of Agile. If you are a leader or a manager, spend a minute thinking about this.

P.S. A handy refresher to look through 🙂 https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html