The Slow, Painful Death of Agile and Jira

I was a newly hired Director of Engineering a company that drank the Kool-Aid of Agile and had an independent team of Scrummasters who just facilitated morning stand-ups. They had no project management responsibilities, so I kept asking what do they do all day after the morning stand-up and no one could answer me. I got severe pushback that they should take on any set of greater responsibilities.<p>I founded several new teams at that company and was approached by the head of the Scrummasters to integrate with their process. I flatly said no, I don&#x27;t need your services, I&#x27;ve been running teams for 20 years and I&#x27;m good. It became this huge blowup that went all the way up the chain of execs until a compromise was reached - I had to accept Scrummasters for my teams but I could direct them to do nothing except basic JIRA ticket shuffling.<p>Fast forward a few years, I&#x27;ve left that place, but my teams became the centerpieces of the company and all new teams are now modeled after them. The Scrummaster team was cut in half.<p>The best part is my team structure is closer to the spirit of Agile with self-organizing teams empowered to operate how best suits them and the Scrummaster team was forcing rigid ceremonies that were at best time consuming and at worst completely useless.

The agile manifesto is pretty short and describes basically the opposite of “Agile” used today.<p>&gt; Individuals and interactions over processes and tools<p>&gt; Working software over comprehensive documentation<p>&gt; Customer collaboration over contract negotiation<p>&gt; Responding to change over following a plan<p>I would read it, but I am running late for my daily standup and haven’t finished updating JIRA yet to document my progress since yesterday’s standup.

Agile is not supposed to make development faster. The core element of being agile (small &quot;a&quot;) is to avoid doing work that results in features that are hardly used, not needed, etc. In lean terminology this is called eliminating waste in a process.<p>Smaller iterations of deliverable work prevents a big up front design and putting in features including UI designs, software designs, coding, tests, QA testing, etc. and then it doesn&#x27;t get used or has minimal ROI.<p>JIRA sucks. If you think your issues with delivery are tied to your work tracking system then you&#x27;re looking at the wrong things.

Agile isn&#x27;t <i>agile</i> when it becomes a proscribed methodology complete with tooling as it violates the final point of the Agile Manifesto:<p><i>Responding to change over following a plan</i><p>The whole point was to be agile enough to work in a manner that&#x27;s most effective your team and organization - and even that may change on a project-by-project bases if different stakeholders are involved.

I really don&#x27;t get the Jira hate. I need a place to read about the problem&#x2F;project, comment&#x2F;question it and know what work was completed and what remains to be done, which it all does well enough. It also integrates directly with GitHub.<p>I guess if GH had its own version that would be slightly easier. I think most people dislike Jira for how their orgs use it, with sprints and points and as a management&#x2F;overseer tool. I feel like 90% of engs hating anything is due to management using something as a shortcut metric to battle royale their team with BS efficiency stats (tickets closed! PRs pushed!)

At some point, I need to learn what Jira is exactly. I only used it once, at an org, for a couple of years. It tracked tasks and bugs and such, and integrated with the source control. It seemed… fine?<p>I had no idea it was specifically linked with “agile”, that org wasn’t doing agile. Is Jira “fine”? Is it really the Agile process that people are hating on?

I&#x27;ve said before but I&#x27;ll repeat:<p>Agile™ was born from web development consultancies as a defensive process for managing bad clients.<p>A lot of the process will make sense if you think about it in terms of business stakeholders eventually suing you. You want to make sure every decision is documented, never commit to a firm timeline, produce artifacts of work at a super granular cadence, and make sure to give stakeholders the illusion of control.<p>It&#x27;s not a good way to make software but it is a consistent way to make software.<p>This makes it attractive to large non-tech businesses because it means that they can effectively reason about and plan software development at a high level. They&#x27;ll never be super fast in delivering that product but for most of these companies that doesn&#x27;t matter. Their moat isn&#x27;t their technology - it&#x27;s something else and they just need the software to work well enough to facilitate the actual business processes that are their moat.

Agile is not dying a slow, painful death. It&#x27;s won. Iterative development is the order of the day in software.

Link that does not require Medium account: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;NYtYD" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;NYtYD</a>

Jira isnt agile. IS just bloeatware.<p>If you need more than a board, and maybe some notifications, you are doing it wrong.

Although Jira is mentioned in the title, it&#x27;s never really discussed.<p>Also, I don&#x27;t fancy the term &#x27;Tech Bloat&#x27; because it doesn&#x27;t seem to cover at all what the issue at hand really is.<p>To me, the real problem is that:<p>- People don&#x27;t like to think about process because it&#x27;s hard and not fun<p>- People don&#x27;t take responsibility for a process or don&#x27;t want to due to risk and little reward<p>- People add tasks steps because a minor thing went wrong once, years ago (and nobody involved is still around)<p>- People NEVER remove tasks because they only see risk no reward<p>- People don&#x27;t seem to understand that processes should be as minimal as possible<p>- People don&#x27;t seem to understand that you need to hire people that need minimal process and still understand what needs to be done (like asking questions instead of making assumptions)<p>What you end up with is an organisation that has a ton of complaints and gossip, but nothing changes.

I love the idea of agile. And I&#x27;ve tried to apply the principles to hundreds and hundreds of projects.<p>But as a consulting type, I&#x27;ve never understood how you run a project with a fixed (well, ok, continuously growing usually) scope, a fixed budget and a fixed timeline. Which are basically the constraints on every single project.<p>I think I have found though, that if you can get a client that will spend the time to really define the project goals and how they will be measured, you can almost steer the scope in the direction of priority features.<p>Then, you can be somewhat successful with running agile on certain parts of a project (like UX design), while &quot;phase-gating&quot; other components of the project that have real dependencies.<p>You end up, in effect, with a waterfall process with some phases being done using agile methodologies.

Jira and the modern cargo cult agile make me hate software development.<p>The important part is to create a team, people working together, helping each other, <i>trusting</i> each other.<p>Anything that increase trust and organic collaboration is useful, most of the rest is a waste of time.<p>Ex: if your estimates are used once to put the blame on someone, congratulation you just destroyed the morale and trust of the whole team. Now everyone will start to lie and pad their estimates, the game is now how to behave to cover your ass and the one of your friends.

&gt; The World Doesn’t Need More Features<p>Whereas a PM&#x27;s job is all about that. We have bloated products. Mostly. Feature packed with FOMO. Incoherent. Inconsistent. Incompatible. But features.

Most shops are doing (theoretically) agile, and specifically scrum.<p>Where I work we are theoretically doing scrum, but it is the worst of all worlds. Tickets (I mean - stories) are very vaguely specified. While we get almost no specs for the stories, we are asked to point the stories, and are then held to those estimates. We have deadlines, even though the point of scrum is not to have deadlines. Also, the features often tend to be complex and incremental, so if I am off doing other work, no one can easily step in and work on the feature I am doing, so that there is the agileness to move me off the feature I&#x27;m working on to fix some fire, but not the agileness to have someone else work on the story.<p>&quot;That&#x27;s not really agile, that&#x27;s not really scrum&quot; - well, whatever. Most of the SWEs I know are in similar boats. It can depend, I did have a PM a few years ago who actually did spec out the stories more. I can get on my PM&#x27;s back to spec out the stories of course, but I can also spend all day getting on everyone&#x27;s back to do their jobs as well.<p>It&#x27;s none of the benefits of waterfall, with almost all of the downsides. Plus the theoretical benefits of scrum like no deadlines or the ability to move people around like cogs is not something found either.

Unfortunately, words often lose their meaning. For example, Democracy. As in the &quot;Deutsche Demokratische Republik&quot;, or East Germany as it was. You can put <i>any</i> name on anything. You can call a tyranny democracy. Does that mean Democracy is bad, or does it just mean some people either don&#x27;t understand it. Democracy is a system of interaction. Agile is a system of interaction. And one could say that Jira is to Agile as the GDR was to democracy. It is designed to sell, right?<p>And who really cares about Agile? It is a name for a system of interaction in software product development. Just a name. The question is whether there is something better. It is easy to say Jira sucks and Agile sucks. The questions are a) is there a better system of software product development and b) are there good tools that help you implement that system?<p>And perhaps the other question is WHY? Why is democracy supposed to work? Why is Agile supposed to work?

Unpopular take: Agile was effective at the beginning, before it turned into a certification&#x2F;rubberstamping goldmine and became so complicated that any efficiency gains evaporated when faced with the amount of ceremony.<p>These days you don’t really need specific tooling—nor should you rely on it to rate features and keep track of meaningful work.

Who in their right sane mine would use a product like Jira with its bad UI?<p>Seriously, I do not want to use a UI that gets in the way of my process...which is why I use kanban boards....so much simpler...and I use it in every process from code to design to writing...

It&#x27;s not agile... it&#x27;s Scrum and Jira.<p>I have been on multiple teams that switched from Scrum to Kanban and will never go back. I&#x27;m convinced the whole process of fitting things into two week sprints is a huge time drain, gets abused too easily, and doesn&#x27;t justify itself if you have decent CI anyway.<p>Give a Scrum Master and a Product Owner a Jira install and you can do the most amazing tricks with disappearing thousand dollar bills.... :-)

Agile peaked with Extreme Programming and paper story cards, since then all that seems to have happened is the adoption of more tools&#x2F;process that missed the whole point of it. The most productive project I ever worked on followed that method - but it&#x27;s very hard to scale up.<p>I worked somewhere where we dumped our (very complicated) &#x27;agile&#x27; tracking tool and went back to cards, and productivity increased, people actually communicated. We did eventually add in JIRA, to support remote team members but banned &#x27;customization&#x27;, &#x27;workflows&#x27; and all the things that actually get in the way of being an Agile team.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freedium.cfd&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ehandbook.com&#x2F;the-slow-painful-death-of-agile-and-jira-c8de04e4269a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freedium.cfd&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ehandbook.com&#x2F;the-slow-pain...</a>

defend your existence! hundreds of hours have been pumped into this framework so ... yeah. something has got to give. can bad be replaced with a lesser bad?! why not take the hit, eat the loss, and uturn to good, perhaps ...

Jira is dying? Hope it is a slow and painful death!<p>Well.. actually, it doesn&#x27;t needs to be slow.

RIP both.<p>Jira is a loss of time. And Agile is even worse, just a useless, counterproductive dogma that only drags the development of the product. We dropped them both during the pandemics, and that&#x27;s how it stayed.

&gt; The World Doesn’t Need More Features<p>Unfortunately, &quot;more features&quot; is a lot easier to market and sell than &quot;simple and actually works&quot;, at least on the timescale most companies operate on.

I&#x27;m writing this while sitting in a &quot;sprint demo&quot;, mobilizing the entire dev team, wasting time and money over 2 hours to demo a bunch of small features with no tangible ROI.

I find it strange how there&#x27;s been so much digital ink spilled over agile and Jira, yet they keep being used everywhere. The author talks about how folks he &quot;routinely interfaces with, including upper management on both the business and tech side, at startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, are done or close-to-done with Agile&quot;, but I&#x27;ll believe that when I see it.<p>The author also notes how one sign of tech bloat is talking to customers repeatedly without becoming an expert on customer behavior. One of the reasons for this is that the people who talk to the customers are often times PMs&#x2F;POs who aren&#x27;t subject matter experts, and their &quot;talking&quot; is simply asking users if they want a new feature instead of doing discovery as to what users need. This is a UX issue first and foremost, but alas, companies are laying off UX researchers and UX people in general.

I miss FogBugz.

&quot;Agile Ceremonies Bible: the decline of the Church of Agile&quot;, this will be the tile of my next book.

I&#x27;ve heard Sr. Architects call Agile &quot;formalized micromanagement.&quot;

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Somewhat related website: &quot;Real opinions from real people about a project management system which unfortunately is also real&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ifuckinghatejira.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ifuckinghatejira.com&#x2F;</a>

Meh, I get people hate Jira, but every time I ask people &quot;What would you rather do instead&quot; there&#x27;s absolutely no agreement on what&#x27;s a better solution.<p>I think it&#x27;s imoprtant to recognize that if a whole crowd of people say &quot;We hate X&quot; but everybody in that crowd hates eachothers proposals even more, it just creates a facade of agreement where there is none.