Agile Antipatterns discussion

Posted by Jeremy Miller on April 30, 2008

From the Java side of the world, a dead on discussion on Agile Anti-Patterns.  Been there, done that, gotten the tee shirt.  I think I’d add:

  • Overly long stand up meetings and/or iteration planning meetings
  • Contention in iteration meetings
  • Not doing retrospectives or not acting on retrospectives.  It’s easy to skip when you’re under duress, but you shouldn’t.
  • Not doing estimation together
  • Not getting concrete acceptance criteria for a user story
  • Not pushing completed stories to testing until late in the iteration

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser Bil Simser

    Something else, not pushing the PO or customer on more clarification on user stories. If the team doesn’t know what the story means they need to push back and have the customer explain it. Far too often, people just take it as gospel and “figure it out”. I say “No!”. Stop and ask and get the customer to tell you what they really want. In addition, I repeat it back to them in my words so we’re both on the same page before any work starts (partially so I know what they said but more that they understand my perspective on what they told me)

  • http://http://agileconsulting.blogspot.com Thomasjeffreyandersontwin

    I just took look at the original post…
    came across as really preachy, I especially dislike the comment “agile is something you do or do not do ”

    Sounds like something Yoda would say…

    I look at agile as more of a continual improvement journey, okay not to be there right away. Just continue to work towards it.

    My specific comments at…
    http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?m=c.reply&thread_id=49239#251845

    Jeff

  • http://www.adronbhall.name/http://adronbhall.name/blogs/technology__software_development/default.aspx Adron

    It seems this list is repeated often, almost as if people are better at screwing up agile processes than actually doing them…

    hmmmm….

    …wait a second. doh! :)