Having spent a year or so in a scrum and "scaled agile framework" shop, this resonates.
The disease is KPIs and metrics, and I'm betting it has gotten worse since COVID and WFH.
As the article states, teams have to focus on capturing every iota of work in tickets and stories and make sure they log the closures correct ly and tie every task to a greater story.
Scrum tools and pointing and tickets should support the goal of writing functional software. But when middle management demands 15 different KPIs determined by various calculations of time, estimates of effort and # tickets closed, the tickets/stories/epics become the goal, and development is the sideshow.
Before my devops role in 2019/2020, I was on a security operations team. We did our version of Kanban. It was simply organizing all our bigger goals/projects (initiatives with a definable end state) into backlog, doing, blocked, done. Operational tasks were worked on without documentation (daily software patches, on call tasks, etc) and small tasks from external teams were documented with a ticketing system and a 3 day SLO. A breach of SLO was not measured in any reporting! It was a good-faith goal that we met most of the time, and if it were breached and the external team got angry they could escalate to our manager.
The point is, the tools we used were made for the team's benefit of productivity and organization, without manager-observed KPIs. We just got shit done.
The disease is KPIs and metrics, and I'm betting it has gotten worse since COVID and WFH.
As the article states, teams have to focus on capturing every iota of work in tickets and stories and make sure they log the closures correct ly and tie every task to a greater story.
Scrum tools and pointing and tickets should support the goal of writing functional software. But when middle management demands 15 different KPIs determined by various calculations of time, estimates of effort and # tickets closed, the tickets/stories/epics become the goal, and development is the sideshow.
Before my devops role in 2019/2020, I was on a security operations team. We did our version of Kanban. It was simply organizing all our bigger goals/projects (initiatives with a definable end state) into backlog, doing, blocked, done. Operational tasks were worked on without documentation (daily software patches, on call tasks, etc) and small tasks from external teams were documented with a ticketing system and a 3 day SLO. A breach of SLO was not measured in any reporting! It was a good-faith goal that we met most of the time, and if it were breached and the external team got angry they could escalate to our manager.
The point is, the tools we used were made for the team's benefit of productivity and organization, without manager-observed KPIs. We just got shit done.