BTW we 💘 Agile with capitalized A

Fuck Agile. Srsly. You LIKE spending 50% of your day on administration?

@devios1 Agile is so nice that I'm in love for those infinite useful meetings

We just picked a few concepts from agile/scrum. Standups? Retrospectives? Having a product owner? Refining tasks into tiny deliverable subtasks? Useful.

Learning a bunch of jargon, playing card games? Meh. Long team meetings? Nah, replace with small pair/group meetings.

Whatever metagame your company wants to play, it should reduce overhead, and be dynamically adjusted to the company instead of statically copied from a book.

@bittersweet well yeah, adapting your methodology depending on what works for you is what agile is about.
Agile isn't the solution to everything, but frankly, it works better than anything else I've seen.

@bittersweet Personally I found retrospectives to be a waste of time after the first few. When you're introducing a new process or changing an old one, retrospectives can help work out the kinks. But doing it religiously after each sprint just became a chore unto itself, and people had to strain to come up with stuff to write down.

There are a couple things from Agile I don't hate. One is story point estimation. I like the Fibonacci sequence of increasing points. But I do NOT like the silly card-voting. I also consider that nonsense.

Standups? Ok if you keep it quick and to the point. When you have 10 people in a room and each one is taking 5 minutes to explain their big plans for the day… shoot me.

@devios1

We use a standup chatbot, so no one has to be at the office, and you have some flexibility regarding the moment.

We use retrospectives more to do a round of "Is anything bothering you", than to discuss process around sprints. It's our throw it all out devRant moment.

We basically don't do fixed sprints either, it's a much more continuous schedule. Both planning/refining and retrospectives are thrown into the mix when necessary, sometimes with a smaller subset of the team.

@bittersweet That doesn't sound as bad as fixed sprints. They feel so arbitrary and pointless. I'm just doing continual development right now (moved to a smaller company) and it's great. Every one in a while we put out a release, usually when the bigger items are done. Having to break up the work into sprint-sized chunks really sucks.