Productivity Over Process

It seems like every software company you talk to will boast about how they use the latest development process du jour—Agile, Lean, XP, Kanban—pick your poison. What’s interesting is that the people evangelizing their chosen methodology are typically managers, not developers, almost emphasizing the process more than the product. Startups and other young tech companies seem to be particularly guilty of this (after all, every time someone utters the words “lean startup”, an angel investor gets his wings).

I’ve worked on a number of different teams, mostly Agile, ranging in size from 4 to 20 developers. I’ve used everything from TFS and JIRA to Pivotal Tracker and Trello to manage stories and track bugs. A process, the way in which you produce something, is often seen as necessary by project managers and a necessary evil by developers.

Are software developers just cowboys who want to build something, guns blazing? To an extent, probably, but the conclusion that I’ve drawn is that there is no silver bullet when it comes to crafting software. It’s not one size fits all. Agile is not the be-all, end-all solution, nor is anything else.

I’ve seen teams that said they were Agile when, in fact, they weren’t in any sense of the word. To some, it’s just a buzzword used to attract talent. I’ve also worked for companies where Agile was used across all teams, no exceptions. This led to problems with the way some groups operated. It worked great for feature teams who were engaged in completing user stories, but for some of the component teams, it just didn’t make sense for the type of work they were doing. My team, very much a backend architecture group of about six developers, was merely going through the Agile motions—a bad sign indeed. We switched to a less structured Kanban process as a result because it worked for us.

Too much emphasis is placed on the process and not the productivity of a team. Am I saying that Agile is bad? Absolutely not. In most cases, an Agile team is a productive team. When an Agile team hits its stride and really grooves, the results are impeccable, but a process needs to be peripheral. It should get out of your way as fast as possible so you can get work done. Don’t just go through the motions.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *