Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture

by Douglas Squirrel

Why, then, do we now see, over and over again, “feature factories” operating in the same spirit as those software factories of the nineties while claiming to be Agile? In fact, only the visible artifacts and processes have changed; the mind-set and the conversations, and therefore the culture, are the same. Instead of mounds of documentation and two-year project plans, these teams are fed a steady stream of features to implement without any connection to the upstream customer needs or the downstream business impact. The software assembly line has been replaced by a sweatshop, with piecework assigned to each worker. The labels are different—requirements may come in the form of stories or acceptance criteria instead of a monolithic document; there may be a burndown chart in place of a Gantt chart—but the outcome is the same: disconnected development, barriers to collaboration, endless handoffs, painfully slow progress, and often wrong software at the end of it all.