Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

3/30/2025 at 3:54:13 PM

> Your team really should be sitting together, pairing, and sharing ownership of their work.

I know the author meant to contrast real communication or collaboration with process - but I feel the opposite. The most effective orgs I’ve been apart of were characterized by clear ownership and autonomy, not by sharing work and consensus. There were clear owners in each area of the business and they had autonomy to deliver results in whatever way they wanted.

Contrast to most startup management culture I’ve encountered, where nobody is responsible for anything because “everybody’s an owner” and “every decision is a team decision”. The idea of code owners is widely rejected in favor of development by committee, under the guise of agile and sharing knowledge. The now widespread practice of requiring PR approvals to merge anything epitomizes this lack of ownership and expertise hierarchy.

A high bus factor means there’s no lynchpin, but no lynchpins means nobody at the organization is actually effective.

by thuanao

3/30/2025 at 7:42:57 PM

So, in such an org, how do you prevent bus factor 1 problems?

by ebiester

3/30/2025 at 6:35:02 PM

Why is this stuff discovered again? Agile not working not because your doing it wrong. It just not working. All agile is cargo cult agile.

by Tractor8626

3/30/2025 at 8:15:02 PM

I know "agile" (we were on the XP flavor) was working for the teams I worked on in the early 2000s, so I'm sure not _all_ agile is cargo-culting... but it seems that the things that made agile work did not survive broader adoption. Which seems like a contradiction, but really isn't: The agile I knew attracted a certain kind of people, and when those people worked together, it worked. But when agile became the thing everybody does, the dynamic of attracting the (perhaps few?) people that actually made agile work was lost.

by vanschelven

3/30/2025 at 7:17:51 PM

"Agile" works, but "Agile" is not a set of rules to follow. "Agile" is a chain of conscious decisions made by a team.

"We have sprints" is not "Agile". Neither "we use Jira", nor "we have retros".

Term "Agile" has been stolen from us, butchered and it's dead body had been turned to scarecrow. And now all those "agile couches", "agile offices", "certified scrum masters" are dancing around it's corpse.

But there are some of us, who worked in truly agile team, we witnessed it in it's glory. We remember when it was alive.

If you worship Cargo Cult, you aren't doing "Agile" despite the name. Period.

by lazystone

3/31/2025 at 11:53:41 AM

Claiming what X works. Never explaining what exactly this X is.

by Tractor8626

3/30/2025 at 8:24:16 PM

And what does work?

Agile certainly works, I see how people around me are finishing projects and customers are happy.

by theragra

3/31/2025 at 11:37:59 AM

Management works.

Are you sure people finishing projects thanks to agile and not despite agile?

by Tractor8626

3/31/2025 at 3:19:46 PM

I am not sure how management can be compared to agile.

It is apples vs oranges. Management often means intolerable beraucracy, snail pace and huge amount of useless reports and other never read docs.

Agile is just an approach that tries to minimize all that. Instead, stakeholders should agree on the best way they should work. They are using tools and processes that help, not encumber.

by theragra

4/3/2025 at 4:13:23 AM

> Management often means intolerable beraucracy, snail pace and huge amount of useless reports and other never read docs.

Only according to sellers of agile-snake-oil.

by Tractor8626

3/30/2025 at 4:00:08 PM

My sense is that this was written with an in-person team that in mind. For remote teams, daily standups are also a way to “sit together” like the author suggests.

by thaw13579