Does agile make you uncomfortable?

[minestrone]

I see a lot of places advertise agile as a skill set which gives me the impression that they don't understand it.

It's a lot of tulipe if you ask me.

[cojak]

Last year I made a conscious decision to turn Agile and took a course to learn about it.

A fellow attendee took my details and grabbed me as soon as I finished my last contract.

As Gentile said, it's all about the contract (what, not how) and working practices. I work from home 2 days a week and we hold our scrums on WebEx.

I'm fortunate that my team is in India, London and America and they need someone to co-ordinate through the time zones.

But it can spoil you, I wouldn't be happy going back to a waterfall project now.

[mudskipper]

Last year I made a conscious decision to turn Agile and took a course to learn about it.

A fellow attendee took my details and grabbed me as soon as I finished my last contract.

As Gentile said, it's all about the contract (what, not how) and working practices. I work from home 2 days a week and we hold our scrums on WebEx.

I'm fortunate that my team is in India, London and America and they need someone to co-ordinate through the time zones.

But it can spoil you, I wouldn't be happy going back to a waterfall project now.

What course did you do? Been doing bits of agile for years, but more as an excuse for lack of planning/structure. Might be useful to learn how it should be done - seems to appear in just about every job advert.

[Mich the Tester]

What course did you do? Been doing bits of agile for years, but more as an excuse for lack of planning/structure. Might be useful to learn how it should be done - seems to appear in just about every job advert.

It appears ion lots of ads, but very few really do it well. When it works, it's brilliant, but it needs top quality techies and minimal interference from management; how often do you find that combination?

[FiveTimes]

I like the principle of it - just makes me worry about the perception of 'part and parcel' of client org.
And the idea that you learn about what you're doing next in the 'team' scrum...

Not at current clientco, I go to the planning stage meetings and decided what I want to do

[VectraMan]

PermieCo "do Agile" in the sense of trying to specify everything in advance, insist everything has to be per spec, and the management refuse to allow any kind of feedback or testing to happen until the last few weeks of the project.

[Robinho]

I like it as the client is effectively liable to make sure what is being done is what is required. And any time wasted from them changing their mind is directly absorbed by them.

[Spacecadet]

I like the principle of it - just makes me worry about the perception of 'part and parcel' of client org.
And the idea that you learn about what you're doing next in the 'team' scrum...

Although in practice I work at a client to deliver a service the permies can't or don't have the skill set for - so I couldn't possibly be 'doing the same job as the permies'.

One practical way I see is if you undertake every piece of work utilising a specific skill/technology or a specific module that no permie would touch - but this again goes against some agile ethos ...

Thoughts?

the issues that I've had with it in the past are:
Client co went "Agile" whilst I was half way through a project. Suddenly I'm expected to join scrums everyday and, as all the teams projects were put into one big agile pot, I had to accept tasks which might not be part of the project I was brought in to work on

The second issue I have is that a pure agile approach means delivering a final solution by means of a thousand changes. Combine that with the possibility of tasks being assigned my importance to the next available person then you can have a lack of consistency which is made even worse when there is no proper team lead and the manager is hands off technical.

IMO any agile project needs strong team leaders to maintain discipline and ensure a consistant approach to delivering solutions , developers should not be free to just take a task and fulfil it as they see fit.

[Cr1spy]

... it's fine for the work to be organised into Stacks and Sprints, for Work Items and Bugs to be assigned to people ...

Work isn't assigned to people in Scrum. The empowered team members take ownership. Just saying like...

[KaiserWilly]

I am an Agile coach. The bottom line: it is another American management fad. Maybe I've become very cynical, but as long as it keeps the contracts rolling, it's OK.