In december of ‘24, a business-side peer of mine asked me how he could fix two problems in his agile teams:
- Address the distributed nature of the team
- Fix bad ticket turn around & high bug count
The first point was simple to address: don’t. Teams either work well together or they don’t: them being distributed rarely changes that. I’ve been in teams that have worked incredibly well while dispersed over Europe & beyond, and others that all used different tools and could literally not collaborate while working 9-5 in the same room.
The second point is much more complicated and was very conviluted. From what I could find, tickets would take long to develop and test. They would also frequently be sent back as failed, and with a very high quantity of bugs.
With the limited information I could gather, and from only one part of the business side, I assumed the blame laid in two places:
- incompetent developers
- badly defined requirements from business, which resulted in changing requirements
So, incompetence on both sides. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to do about that.
My biggest issue was that I was told that tickets would go through multiple (sometimes 10+) rounds of definition -> dev -> QA -> business and then being failed to redo the cycle once more. This was clearly a case of unclear and changing requirements. There’s a fine line in Agile with detailing stories in development, and not having defined anything worthwhile. Who am I kidding, it’s not a line, it’s a fucking chasm.
Every time I’ve heard the whole requirements management, requirements change, and environment are hard to manage, I have to point out that those are ancient problems.
The other side of this is that you need to work with what you’ve fucking got. Cool, you have incompetence in your teams: deal with it. In any situation, you have to understand what you can make with the tools and environment at your disposal. In this case, tighten the leash, limit scope, whatever it takes to actually get people to get shit done.
These two videos are great at detailing these issued, and completely outside of IT. In part, that’s my major gripe of working in ‘tech’ ie IT. Too many of us assume that we’re just so fucking smart, and that these are all new problems that clearly nobody but us could possibly ever solve.
And if you come at me saying that the 1800’s or any other time in history didn’t have requirements or environment issues, boy do I have news for you…
Another thing that drives me nuts is how Agile has been bastardized: it’s been taken over by management. I did an Agile certification, and it was the most brain-dead thing I’ve ever done: it was by management, for management. Our glorious Uncle Bob’s take on the matter sums the problem up:
I told my peer these things, and nothing’s happened. That’s what happens in big organisations… the lumbering beasts that they are.