This post of mine is inspired from sdhanasekar’s blog entry How to measure productivity. He discussed a typical scenario about how a team member did an estimation and failed to meet that.
The scenario that he discussed is really a common thing that is happening in current project teams. As more and more organizations are pretending to be Agile, they are increasing the indirect or direct pressure on the individuals to commit on something that they might not be confident on completing. And once the commitment is made, the whole pressure is to deliver that irrespective of the fact that it can be completed as per estimation or not.
If we revisit Agile Manifesto, it says
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
People are implementing Agile, based on their understanding and the main intention behind it is to meet quicker goto market plans. So does it mean that the team that is working in Agile mode should be more productive? Is it just to keep them under pressure always so that they forget everything else; even no time to collaborate with team members!
But as the teams are being made to achieve unrealistic targets that they set for themselves without doing proper analysis is an area of concern that should be addressed sooner than later in the software industry. Is it really to make teams more productive?
A Blog by Vipul Gupta 
Hi,
True agile is misused by many just to put pressure on team to deliver something on every two weeks, by giving unrealistic targets. Even if we go with targets it is cut by 50% on spot. Only one aspect of deliver workable software every two or three weeks is followed from agile and everything else is forgotten. This is making a very bad impression about agile in many software engineers mind. That is very sad. When i attend the first meeting on intro to agile I loved it when showed with agile manifesto, believe in people not on tools or processes. I like to work like that. When I came out of the meeting and told to fill the time sheet, burn down chart, TDD etc.. Shocked when you say only measurable output is working software then why the hell do you need this. Any way you see the progress every two weeks during the review that is the whole funda of agile. But, why to track every minute task at ever day?
High time for the companies to re-look on the strategy of pretending to be agile
–Dhanasekar S
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