The death of Agile - Allen Holub 

Why does this video has only 50k views?! All world should see this!!! Spread it out!

I work for an automotive OEM that is undergoing an "agile transformation". Feels like I have been in a project management twilight zone for the last 9 months. Listening to Allen has been so refreshing as before I was struggling to make the distinction between SAFe, Scrum and the Agile philosophy they keep trying to sell it to us as. What we are essentially using is scrum on steroids. Watching the project leads analyse the burndown chart based on arbitrary story points, using an estimation system that means an 80 point sprint could be anything from 1000 days work to 80 minutes gives me hernias in real time. Amazed that this thoughtful study of the agile process and how its being perverted was 7 years ago! Sometimes it feels like no amount of resistance can stop the new religion of SAFe.

Absolutely brilliant. Having experienced practically every single dysfunction that Allen describes, I found myself vigorously nodding my head in agreement. Thank you Mr. Holub. Pure genius created in the kiln of experience.

Great talk. Might better have been titled: "Why you'll probably never see Agile development in the real world"

The one downvote is a Scrum master who fears for his job :)

Impressive. The culmination of failures that my organization have been going through, expertly laid out in this video. It's like finally getting a diagnosis on an unexplained disease. I hope to find more material from Allen Holub. Thank you!!!

The best. Most direct. Most concise. Most clear.

The company I work for has implemented agile this year. I am in the middle of the training now. My impression is that instead of making things agile, it will multiply the administration effort for every single thing we do in the company. I might be wrong.

Very nice talk and amazing how this is still relevant in 2022!

Just came across this after not seeing it for 4 yrs. Still rings true. LOVE the point about the QA department....

It's almost 9 years old and this talk is still depressingly relevant. I don't see any of the companies that are "agile" going out of business any time soon though.

this guy is amazing...absolutely in love !!!

This is exactly I am thinking since last 2 years and wanted to write about it. You already have this viedo. Thank you.

Outstanding!!

Unfortunately Spotify didn’t implement the ‘Spotify Model’ in full - it was more aspirational. The model also didn’t scale for them. At least that’s what I understand from various Podcasts and Blog posts from people claiming to have been involved. So this talk, while interesting, has it’s own Cargo Cult moment.

this talk is seven years old and painfully relevant today. wtf happened the last seven years ???

Very good presentation. It is really useful. Thanks for sharing

Great Presentation

excelent. all my thoughts about agile in one video.

Amazing presentation!

We are not alone, there is hope after all!

Allen, Well-done and spot on (Lean-Agile Consultant).

Very good! Thanks!

Best thing I've seen on Agile and scrum ever. Thanks. I wish I can join or create such a company.

Brutal. And true... Thank you

Very spot-on talk, I agree with the certification mills, agility of training and the dysfunctional tools points. The level of frustration in the voice tone most likely reflects actual experiences. ;)

This was a great talk. I have 1 issue with your "attack" on JIRA or other tools to replace the whiteboard. Currently (COVID) there's no way to do face-to-face, so no physical whiteboard is going to help you. You HAVE to have a tool that everyone can access to see progress, issues, ect. online. If everyone's not in the office, you can't work 100% the way you describe. I agree, co-located is preferred, but if that's not possible, you can still be Agile. My team's performance in the last year of WFH proves this.

I agree with a lot of what you say here, although complex systems that require functional safety certification can't work this way.

So many CEOs and MDs need to see this.

What an amazing speech..!!! This is so close to what I am witnessing every day, in my company.We started agile 5 years ago, and we gave up. Now, we are in a stateless mode, wandering....

I feel this is right on, from years of experience developing in businesses of a wide variety of sizes and industries. I've seen it done right and I've seen the counterfeit way described. I think the counterfeit Agile that Allen warns about is the thing that gives Agile a bad name to people who are against Agile itself.

This is tremendous. I've seen many places that want to do "scrum" but they're not "all in". The business doesn't understand agile just like Allen talks about - they are the Cargo Cults. And they HAVE to understand from the top or it will always be modified waterfall. You can't have an IT BA play the role of Product Owner just because the business doesn't understand (or doesn't want to understand) their role. This is great stuff.

It is even worse for me. I am the hardware guy who was forced into pseudo-Agile and it is nothing more than a burden of overhead. I am a resource to a Scrum team doing the increment/sprint stuff. It is exactly as he said, waterfall with Agile faceplate.

I just spent two days in SAFe training -- telling us that the way we were working before wouldn't / doesn't work. We work in an interative way..works for us and our customers, our customers don't want a release every day or even every week. Our management thinks that we'll make more money if we're Agile..which isn't true either. Our biggest problems is no one wants to write or commit to decisions or requirements. Anyway..we're off to see the Wizard of SAFe.

it's always refreshing to see when someone speaks the truth.

Couple of things. Irrespective of what Agile purists say, Project management continues to be required in lots of organisations especially in service organisations as they have to go with the process of the client organization and lots of these organisations are not agile enough. They still define projects, continue to work on triple constraints. In turn these service organisations have to follow the suite. Second, Scrum is not a process. Scrum is a process framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Having said that, definitely one doesn't have to follow Scrum to become Agile. As long as one is following Agile values and principles, one is agile

The vision portrayed here is very much aspirational, which I guess is his point. If you want to do Agile as he described it (meaning being actually Agile) then you need a very experienced team (that rules out the vast majority of teams) and, yes, the right company. Saying that 'deadlines don't exist' or 'there is no project manager in Agile' is simply going to have senior execs rolling around on the floor laughing their heads off. Unless you can find a way to do Agile within the context of a company that uses formal project management practices then forget it. Most of us have to work in the real world, not in some sort of software development utopia. One point that cheeses me off is the way Scrum has become a formal process which doesn’t fit in every situation. But a very good presentation nonetheless!

savage. love this guy.

Best Agile talk ever

bless this man for speaking the truth

Quite a lot of agile tools and frameworks are useful for a transition period. Also in the big scheme of things, agile will probably transform come some years down the road. It's born out of a response to a more uncertain market and changing requirements, and as such will have to change as that landscape changes.

This guy's a radical. I like it.

the best standup ever :)

I love the point on Friction. Dev manager goes to management with an update and they want more faster and do not care about the ethics of reasonable code. The negotiation sucks so lets fire the Manager and hire a couple 20 year olds who have never written a line of code to get devs to make daily promises on itty bitty tasks in which the backlog excludes any kind of infrastructure work, security, etc. Problem solved ! No Friction and if anything goes wrong we fire a dev or 2. If the a hacker gets you and there is a 10 million dollar law suit, you can go to the next company and continue the cycle.

This is a good talk. It just sounds a bit too similar to Dave Thomas's famous "Agile is Dead" presentation.

YES

Gold.

I agree with every single word exept customer management. Sometime customers could be milion of people you need to manage the interaction in a very structured way.

3:30 There is no project manager on the agile team

Why trying to do strum and plan sprints ahead if anything will change anyway? Be lean, eleminate the wasted working hours by trying to do this roadmap planning. Just use a priority list and do kanban instead of scrum.

some really good points. However we should not confuse process owned by teams and teams of teams vs. frameworks guiding to live according to values and principles

21:40 I agree about the Certification Mills.

cannot agree more...

Does anyone know the source for the XP Values / Principles / Processes illustration Holub uses at the 26:11 mark?

This is all organisational management, hierarchical vs flat vs cells. His description is of flat and dynamic cells structure with LOs, but wrapped up in a cultish jargon that can be packaged and sold to companies.

That sounds like a dream. Unfortunately I haven't met companies that work like that

Great talk. The point to be noted is this guy is against agile methods but gives thumbs up to companies going agile

I think why i am always skeptical of joining any new tech company or startup boils down to if there are actually reasonable programmers there that know arbitrary estimations don' t work. agile is really unpleasant to do especially when you're a creative developer with ideas

I like how he mentions the importance of culture and trust throughout an organization to a successful agile implementation. There's a lot of wisdom here. In fact, these might be prerequisites. In other words, if you want an agile transformation, don't start by forcing people to attend daily status report meetings or do some other aspect of Scrum dogma. Instead, focus on building trust.

The only thing I question in this presentation is the documentation. Now it could be how companies do Agile but when people ask what is that doing and why from a business rule perspective or explaining why we made a decision and not another has been beneficial. The biggest failure I have seen in Agile is it doesn't take into account how the puzzle piece fits into the entire jigsaw puzzle and most people don't care. I had a requirement where they wanted to manage turning off connections to certain locations. They list the one internal challenge as it changes the relationship with a internal system. I raised it impacted an extract to a 3rd party system that the B2C custom used to build those relationships with that group it was like showing a caveman fire. It blows my mind that people stay in the silo but don't have a basic understanding of the larger eco system.

Ugh I’m a Scrum Master and somewhat of a coach and have been doing some “introductory training” on agile for my team. Just found this video and it explains everything I have been saying but in a way more succinct way. I hope the author doesn’t mind, because they’re now on my reference list!

How does anyone get any work done with these constant interruptions advocated by agile teachers?

How do we fix it though? I agree with everything here but I can't move a large ship by myself. Or do we just quit and find another job somewhere else?

At 6:40 Mr Holub makes a devastating observation: the whole organization has to be "Agile", not just the software developers. Coming from an Enterprise ISV that "forced marched" from "waterfall", classical development was painful, but Engineering did this within one year. What we discovered was that customers were not Agile. Their IT organizations could not deploy s/w developed in 90 day cycles. The back office end users rebelled against changes in the systems: their performance metrics degraded 15-20%. When one of your customers has 24,000 end users of your system, this is a problem. Their CEO calls your CEO. Lawyers get hired. The Business division owns the contract. The IT Division "owns" the operational success, but not the budget for it. Agile s/w delivery is seen as a solution to delivering CAPEX scope system changes within an OPEX budget. Customers wanted to pick and choose select feature changes as "system patches", not as full releases. Lastly, any Enterprise s/w system has to integrate with legacy and in-house s/e systems, hence the Corporate Customer's IT Division has to be Agile too.

Even the best plans of process and technology, laid out by professional engineers and project managers with decades of experience can be sabotaged by toxic culture of Agile, resulting in substandard quality of software: The very idea of incremental development, where in order to create a car, first you need to make a bicycle and later just add two wheels on, is incompatible by any minimal standard of engineering.

Back when I did the CSM, you could get absolutely every question wrong and still be issued a certificate... because you paid for it

So far I only have experienced Agile once....and it wasn't a good experience. I could've been alot more productive but I kept getting stopped because *"that's not Agile, you have to create a Userstory for that first"* so instead of implementing features I knew we would need, or fixing/tweaking stuff I knew needed to be changed the project often got stalled just so the clients could confirm in the next meeting that "yes, thats indeed stuff that needs to be done" As thats my only experience with it I'm not sure if Agile is bad, or if it was just very poorly implemented, in any case it was anything but *agile* .

12:29 - try telling the client "it will be done when it will be done". That only works in gaming and only for beloved companies.

This should be titled: why SCRUM is not AGILE. Really interesting stuff.

13:44 -what if client demands it as they believe it provides them value? Like most corpo clients?

There is only ONE thing I disagree. No developers cannot fully test the PRODUCT. They are CODE experts.. and a product is not only code. Developers are not the target of your product so no you CANNOT rely in their acceptance of quality. When you do that you end up with what we see in TV and movies like now. .. the team that made the movie think it is the best thing ever.. but every one that see it a theaters wants to throw up. You must have people that are NOT part of the building team evaluating your product.

Over simplified. How do you develop a new feature for 2000 Enterprise customers? Put all of them in the room? How do you prevent WIP without Sprints? Are all developer equal in all aspects and you can count all of them to make good decisions? What if people try to make XP without testing every 3 minutes because this is the part they dislike? Why do we sometimes need to encourage people to step out of their comfort zone if we can just trust them to always repeat the same decision? Who makes sure people are committed to evolve their skills?

The US Air Force went through a similar thing with the Total Quality movement starting in the early nineties. The US Chief of Staff had heard that the Total Quality movement could work wonders in industry, and decided that he would apply it in the Air Force. It soon became clear that he only intended to use the terminology, while rejecting just about every substantive reform that TQ required. The whole effort was abandoned after he retired. There is now no indication in the Air Force that TQ was even attempted.

This is so true. It's madness nothing else. This guy makes total sense. The day you are able to change the mindset of your workforce, the Agile method will work.

"There's no hierarchy, no bosses" - So when did Spotify become a worker coop? Tribes/Guids/Squads, gross corporate-speech.

Where have you been my whole life?

11:46 -nice to say, worse if the training you need is booked till the next year.

Everyone is equal but some is more equal than others

As you can't plan for Problems so you can't do so for creativity ... ! ...

I've been saying this for a couple years now. But Allen explains it 1000 times better than I can. I will say that I oppose the idea that being Agile is somehow binary. I look at the Agile values and principles in the same way a Buddhist looks at the values and principles of Buddhism. Anyone on the path of enlightenment is in their own specific place and time on that journey. As such, they will naturally pick and choose the beliefs and values that support them on their journey at that moment. We in Western civilization tend to favor a more dogmatic approach where you either follow the commandments and are saved or you don't. That's not how this really works in the real world. And as a result, I support teams picking and choosing (if they possess the maturity to do so) from the Agile values and principles so long as they understand the consequences. Just look at what a book seller named Amazon was able to do to the ENTIRE retail industry in a matter of years, and then you will understand the opportunity cost of moving too slowly along the process of evolution. But if you are moving forward, growing and learning, you have a shot. Great talk.

@14:41 For the record, since this is the most replayed segment of this video: that image is a complete lie. Spotify never worked like that, and their attempt to make it work like that was an abject failure. Spotify never successfully scaled Agile at all, and quickly abandoned it. And it wasn't a matter of whether Spotify really wanted to give full autonomy to teams and let them self manage and have a horizontal structure and no middle management etc etc. They genuinely wanted to do all of that. Unfortunately, no matter how good your intentions are, most developers are simply not mature and competent enough to learn and understand how to develop in an agile way. Adhere to the discipline of TDD? Good luck getting a team of hundreds to adhere to the discipline of showing up to work. The closest model of agility at scale is more like Amazon. You give the STO total autonomy over one or maybe two separate two-pizza teams. But the organization is otherwise entirely hierarchical, and the STO implements whatever organizational structure is needed, with heavy Organizational Network Analysis to determine the impact of organizational structure on deliverables.

27:39 a very important point. upfront requirements doesn't work. but people are just. get the full requirements right and then only start working. till then don't do anything. i don't understand this. agile means flexibility. adapting to changes and as we get the know problem, requirement better. don't code till then. it doesn't make sense...

the moment you realise this guy is the director of QA

When we introduced SAFe, I questioned the value. But ......

I tend to agree with him, but I have worked in big companies, small companies, a university, etc, and I have never seen a company or organization that fits the description of agile, to me that's just a unicorn. Imagine saying let's all go to 'X' conference without asking anybody outside the team about it

I wish more agile people would talk about software in embedded. I work in the automotive industry and it's a shit-show. We have hard deadlines because of strict contracts, and most of the time the quotation process is made by a different team than the one who actually develops the project. For some reason the OEMs don't like it when their 2021 model year car is going to be delayed until 2022, because the $100 million dollar quotation was done poorly.

Holub on Patterns is one of the most difficult programming I ever *tried* to read. Which begs the question, whatever happened to design patterns? Not as popular as it used to be, just like Agile.

So what do finance processes look like in an agile company? One of the things the finance team does is validate theres budget and validate where the money is going to (lots of scams exist to confuse people to send money to the wrong place).

11:24 - I've yet to hear about a major IT product that has their client available on day to day. Either you don't knownyour client until you finish and sell your program or your client is a big corpo that you literally cannot get to have a call with you. At best you have their IT team which knows exactly as much as you cause they are IT, not the end user of the program.

I mostly agree with this opinion. Except I wouldn't be so severe concerning Scrum. What is missing in the picture is : what do we know about individual and their interactions ? Almost nothing. We believe a lot, but we know very little. We experience some pattern that work....until they stop working. If we are honest we must admit that often we don't understand why. 120 years of sudies and research in human nature (psychology, sociology of groups, ethnology...) remain discounted by the agile community. Once you put this knowledge in the picture Scrum makes a lot of sense.

I like the idea of three hats, user, designer and developer. As a user, you are on the front lines of necessity, which is the mother of invention, and being on the front lines of application use, you are better suited to a vision of better, and more capability of the tools you require. You know exactly what you need, so you should become a developer. Three hats don't exist in corporate and so, less than half assed products are produced. You can clearly see the lack of vision that was applied. Accounting applications are the same bullshit.

I was in datacenter IT for a while and this is so horribly true about corporations... It was so hard to actually get work done while; filling out cap labor forms, figuring out how to properly submit expenses, sitting in on bogus calls, and conforming to the latest corpo policy every 6 months. Madness.

"we do not have a hierarchy" a notion that is anathema to many business entities, not just mega corps. I once worked for a company that had maybe 40 employees. we in the technical staff were at the bottom of the org chart, and management (aka, the owners) wanted it that way. people with power will do anything to hold on to that power, and empowering their perceived underlings to take control of a major part of a business process is a threat to their power. the upper levels of the hierarchy will fight that tooth and nail. that's not some business school lesson, that's basic human nature.

Agree: Yes, I'm frustrated by "Agile" because nobody seems to understand that agile is an idea that needs constant refactoring and flexibility itself, like the software that should be created by it. Disagree: 2-3 minutes in an editor before retesting my software? That might be enough time to change or fix a parameter (which should not be in the code anyway), but not for doing any atomic implementation change. You might be able to correct a syntax error in 2-3 minutes, but that is nothing that should reach the test lab anyway.

Time traveling from 2024: At last an "Agile sux" video that makes sense. Agile doesnt suck, bad Scrum sucks. Allen pinpoints the problem - We need a culture of Agility. And Orgs are looking for a quick fix. And they love their extant culture. So change does not happen. What's most alarming is that this is 8 years old and still relevant.

so...what you are saying is that it is impossible for large organizations to actually be/do the agile thing? The way you that are painting agile principles makes me want to avoid it like the plague.

Incorrect graphic for needle at 3:48 with respect to camel fitting through eye of a needle. It was a narrow doorway, not a sewing tool.

What happens if you have 3000 customers? Who should sit on an average team's sprint review, or demo?

If all these companies are trying to move towards agile software development, but no one seems to achieve it, does it simply not mean that agile is not practical in real world scenarios and it the end does not work? That is the bottom line to me. It seems that you need some magical Goldilocks conditions for it to work and you need people (culture) with very strong focus on avoiding nonsense and bloat, which never happens in large companies because you get all kinds of people. Example: 34:02. All you need is one or two people to say "Hey, it's not my job to organize groups, I don't get paid for that" to poison the team and it's done. Also business people don't want to sit in with the tech people, that's another thing that works against agile development. Allen already mentioned QA and why that works against it too. Culture is extremely hard to build and very easy to spoil and if you do build it, then it automatically becomes very productive and you can call it agile or whatever terminology you want after that. It feels to me that the terminology comes AFTER the formation and observation rather than creating the work environment by following it. Agile software development starts with small companies because people in charge who are probably owners and developers have to be quick, they move fast and they have the mentality to respond quickly. They have a strong interest to do it. But once that scales and you get all kinds of people that becomes very hard to maintain unless you have an extremely serious screening processes and hire people only with the right attitude. Agile is very fragile.

So what you are saying is that the Agile Team itself is rigid. What needs to be actually agile is everything that touches it - the corporation, customers, the product, etc.