Rearranging Tickets On The Titanic

Backlog refinement as the band just plays on and on.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

I often wonder how exactly, when a company first embraces the pleasure of the “agile” process, everything suddenly jumps right out of the relatively comfortable, sizzling and soothing, frying pan and straight into the blazing fires of hell.

I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the number of meetings exponentiates, more and more unfamiliar people start to attend them, and discussion over what you would think are trivial points (for example, the definition of a story point, for one) soak up increasingly vast amounts of developer time that, you know, could be spent actually doing productive things.

But, this rapid escalation of needless box ticking process aside¹, and not even mentioning when the various (weekend seminar at a spa club) trained agile evangelists (at extortionate cost, I may add) may be brought in to “steer” or “monitor” the transition and the headaches and trauma that causes, there is still something widely overlooked that contributes to the drastic fall in both efficiency and productivity that “embracing agile” really brings to the backlog refinement² table.

You see, there’s this continued illusion, primarily within management circles, that constantly re-prioritising tickets is somehow extremely productive and what agile is really all about.