Why do devs hate Agile?

Someone asked me this the other day: “Why do devs hate agile?” and as I worked through my answer I thought it worth writing down. There are three reasons I can think of but before we get to them…

First off, I don’t think all “devs do hate Agile”. Or rather, I don’t think the vast majority of them hate it - and hate is a very strong word. Sure some do, no doubt but all? A blanket “all devs hate” ? No.

I do think its is fashionable to slag agile off, and few do this better than the agile community themselves. And unfortunately like a lot of fashions once it gets started it catches on. Once dev A says “I hate Agile” then dev B thinks its cool to say it too, and dev C sees A and B doing it so joins in.

The ironic thing about all this is that Agile is the product of developers. In the beginning it was developers - like me - who saw that the classical way of doing things (write down what the customer wants, design it, plan it, code, it, etc.) didn’t work very well but noticed that the way most work actually happens (quick, code foo… O foo is not quite right change it, quick) was actually better.

I was inspired by Jim McCathy’s book Dynamics of Software Development. Jim was a developer, albeit a developer who had started managing other developers. It was that book that made me think “alternative ways are valid.”

Similar insights were occurring with developers all over the world - as they raced to fix Y2K using heavy weight processes. Some of these coders went on to become mildly famous: Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham and Martin Fowler for example.

And here in lies number #1 why “devs hate agile.”

Theft and imposition.

Agile was all about dev in the early days - especially XP. Just 10 years ago coders would say “I’d love to work Agile by my (project) manager won’t let me.” So we set about making Agile manager friendly, we expanded the business arguments for why Agile was good, and managers got it. Now you hear developers saying things like “My manager wants me to work agile but he doesn’t understand” or “My manager wants me to work agile but does’t help.”

In the beginning Agile was a bottom up movement. Now it is a top-down movement, change is imposed on people rather than people wanting to change.

That is wrong.

Making it worse is the fact that many of those imposing the change frequently fail to understand the change they are imposing or do not question their own thinking. Management thinking needs to change too - start with Software Development is Upside Down.

Reason #1: Agile is now an imposed change.

In my experience developers want to work Agile because true Agile allows them - no, demands - they do a quality job. Agile doesn’t deliver half the benefits it promises if organizations don’t pay attention to quality, that means their technical practices, thats what we used to call technical excellence. That means developers doing work that are proud of.

Namely “technical practices from XP”, specifically: simple design, relentless refactoring, test driven development (plus behaviour driven development), pair programming and things like face-to-face conversations and “story is a placeholder for a conversation.”

I’ll point the finger specifically at Scrum, and later Kanban, for not mandating these practices - something I did with Xanpan. Part of making agile acceptable to management was removing the words extreme and programming, and down playing the difference high quality can make.

Without these practices teams are driven harder to deliver something sooner and quality drops. As quality drops it gets more difficult to deliver anything in a short amount of time. Consequently more is demanded of coders, stress and tension rise and it is not fun.

Reason #2: Agile without technical quality makes developers lives worse.

I remember meeting some coders in Cambridge, almost the first thing they told me was “We hate Agile, our managers went on a Scrum course and have insisted we do it for months.” I quickly discovered that they were not doing any technical practices, as a result they were racking up more and more technical liabilities and making their own lives harder. Once I explained that they were missing the technical practices their attitude changed.

Now to the final reason, perhaps the big reason…

The Agile toolset is intended to help teams organize themselves, it is intended to make problems visible so they can be addressed and fixed. In the hands of people with the right attitude this is brilliant.

Teams don’t need a manager (although one may still be useful).

Teams can see problems.

And teams can fix problems.

But… the very same tools used by someone with the wrong attitude are a micro-managers dream.

Which micro-managers wouldn’t want everyone to give a status report at 9.00am every day?

Who wouldn’t want to see all work broken down to pieces for which NAMED individuals could be held accountable?

And why wouldn’t they want to make a shocked face and send a very clear “that is not acceptable” message every time an estimate was high?

Visibility becomes a tool of blame.

I once helped a team at an airline set up a Kanban board, instead of using it to see bottlenecks, problems and find opportunities to improve the managers concerned used it to assign blame, point fingers and demonstrate that nothing was happening because someone else wasn’t doing their job.

Reason #3: In the wrong hands the same Agile tools are very effective micromanagement tools.