I was catching up on some of my mailing lists this evening when I came across the following post by the Agile Coach at my former employer:
One of our development groups, 4 XP teams, just ended a 3 month period of management imposed overtime. The result was lower velocity, more defects delivered to production, more time spent fixing production problems, more sick days.
MoreTime != MoreValue
While I couldn’t agree with him more, it was disheartening because I know the people on those teams and is an amazing admission that when faced with a crisis the real belief in XP by management will come out.
First, anytime I see the words “mandatory mangement” anything is a big red flag that something is amiss. In an XP team you have to communicate with your teams to understand how to get past the problems and achieve the solution.
For example, there were times when something needed to get done, and we were on a deadline we wanted to meet, so we would work extra to get it done. Which is fine for two reasons:
- We, as a team, decided it
- It was for a short term, after which we went back to our normal schedules
But three months? There is nothing sustainable in that pace and either means that the teams have stopped communicating, management has stopped listening, or everyone has just given up.
What’s disheartening is that, when I was there, I saw teams and individuals who really believed in XP. They saw the value, craved the communication and the openness, and were doing their best to make it work in spite of the limitations imposed on them from a top-down deployment of XP.
It’s also disheartening because I fear developers are going to leave there thinking that’s the way XP is, and have a bad taste in their mouth.
That coach must be a better man than I, because I certainly can’t imagine staying on as a coach trying to help people through everything he has been through, including this. I only hope that things begin to turn around, that the devs understand they have the power to change things, and that management understands that now is the time to really listen to what the dev teams are saying and act on them.
Yes, It was disheartening. That was why I left, too. (one of the reasons)
During my final months there I realized that we were no longer doing XP, which made me think: “Why do we need an xP coach when we aren’t really doing xP?”
We would get out of xP mentor meetings and try to implement the changes we had talked about only to be told by management that we needed to sit down and write code. (?!?!?)
The biggest downer for me was that I BELIEVED in doing xP. I read the books, I remained enthusiastic and tried to lead/coach my team to better xP. The problem was: there was no support. The coach didn’t add any value. When we would tell the managers, there was this look of disbelief. “Why don’t you fix it?” Well, because we didn’t have the authority to fix it.
Now I get to do TDD (albeit by myself) and there are lots of opportunities for writing better code.