Agile Anti-Patterns

A few Agile anti-patterns I have experienced as a developer are:

• Business Allowed to be Lazy. A counter-productive friction exists between highly productive developers (held accountable by process metrics) and largely unaccountable business proxies. Often the business proxies abuse the flexibility of discovery in Agile and some use it as an excuse to be lazy or disengaged.

Why are developers asked to estimate a story if the business can't articulate clear acceptance criteria or fail to deliver a simple sketch or wire frame?

• Over-Emphasis on Velocity. Speed is mistaken for velocity. Velocity has two components – speed and direction. I’ve been on teams who were delivering working software iteration after iteration only to find we were building a product that was unusable, inferior, or somehow missed the mark because direction from the business was misguided or lacking. We focused on delivering, not on the product.

When the burn down shows "done" and the business has a product they couldn't use or don't want, it's the business' fault. Because the only way this could happen is that they didn't show up to the demos, didn't ever walk through the lab, didn't talk to anyone building or testing the system. If there was no mechanism to make sure the blame was spread there, this is just pure corporate oncological dysfunction.
~Colonel Nikolai, post comment Oct 28, 2011 08:04AM.

• What to do with Project Managers? Traditional PMs are too often shoe-horned onto Agile teams because the organization can't figure out what else to do with them. Traditional Project Management is an extension of old-school Command & Control that savvy developers can't abide. It is based on hard estimates and Gantt charts. I have observed PMs using Burn-down charts like a blunt instrument to flog developers.

Dear PM,
When you continually ask 'Is it done yet?', the veracity of the answers rapidly degrade to pure lip service.

• Process Over Pragmatism. Teams often feel compelled to follow process for process sake or because it's been decreed by the organization. The most effective Agile teams I have been on discovered what worked in the prevailing conditions. There is no one-size fits all.

Dear Process Cop,
Developers welcome process when it makes sense, but gratuitous ceremony is a waste of everyone's time.

• Standup as Status Update. Standup meetings seem to have devolved from the imagined intent to be informative and consequential to tedious status updates.

Dear Teammate,
If you don't have something wildly informative or marginally consequential to say, please cede your turn. Standup is not CYA.

Do these seem familiar? Which anti-patterns have I missed? I welcome your feedback.