Scrum/Agile-English Dictionary.

[reddragdiva]

The free E-meter at every desk is a valuable job perk! The Kool-Aid tasted a bit funny, though.

sprint: artificial crisis

end of sprint: abandonware

Scrum Master: CV credit for my planned escape to a new company

stakeholder: someone you can't get away with externalising your costs onto, because they can hammer a wooden spike through your heart

Project Manager: a job that no longer needs to exist in the astounding new world of Scrum! (Pay no attention to the project owners, product owners, story-writing users above you in the org chart or Scrum Masters behind the curtain.)

simplified: doesn't implement the actual business requirements

lightweight: doesn't implement the actual business requirements, but does so much more elegantly than the version that works

easy: project was born circling the drain (and doesn't implement the actual business requirements)

legacy: the version that works and implements the actual business requirements, though no sane human wants to touch it

Minimum Viable Product: doesn't actually work, but claims to tick at least some of the list of business requirements. Schedule another sprint if you want additional features like "functionality."

user story: a valiant attempt to extract coherent requirements and bug reports; ends up being precise specifications for the wing feathers of the desired magical flying unicorn pony

velocity: a speed with a direction: skittering about following marketing's random hairpin turns

retrospective: blamestorm incoming!

stand-up: establishing blamestorm targets early

Inspect and Adapt: perhaps bong hits will fix my makefile

We'll put that on the backlog: lol GFY

doing Agile wrong: noticing any of the above.

I do enjoy some of the jargon. empowered: do your own fucking job. "Could you just copy down these log files from these fifteen servers for me and put them on the shared drive? Thanks." "I'm sorry, I'm afraid you're empowered to do that."

Every good idea is turned into a bad one by the relentless management quest to Taylorise clue.

HT the Monastery

Comments

To the airlocks: in space, no-one can hear you scrum

[hairyears]

Go on: try defining 'phased delivery' without resorting to "Like 'Live prototyping' but with even bigger fuckups and no roadmap for remediating them".

Or try 'Adaptive release' as: "We'll packaged three releases, each with slightly fewer of the *annoying* bugs, and the users will be so grateful that they overlook the missing functionality."

Will maniacal laughter do for any mention of 'Security' in Agile?

[alextiefling]

While I don't respect my boss quite as much as I used to, he went back up a few notches in my estimation when he described our supplier's project work as having gone 'completely agile'. There was no need for him to go further: we both knew that this meant that the entire thing was a fuckup, and we were going to have to stage-manage the public release of something we knew didn't work.

Contrast my boss at the previous place, who came back from an offsite meeting about how a mission-critical megaproject was going to use Agile in its most formal sense, wearing the hungry expression of a monk who has just been told that orgies are sacred. *shudder*

[tcpip]

The basic thing that worries me about Agile is not that it's inherently wrong (it is, in fact, the right project management method in some cases), but rather there is a whole range of clueless IT managers all around the world who think that it is the answer because it is the fashion when in reality they don't even know what it is or when to use it.

[nonethefewer]

Reading through past entries because rosefox recommends you, and this is SO TRUE holy what.