How I Responded To a Work Agile Survey Today

The definition of the word "agile" in the rest of the world means something like "graceful" or "dexterous" or "fluid" or "able to move quickly and react on the fly".

Somehow, the definition of the word "agile" that exists in the software engineering world means the exact opposite of that. When you see the word "agile" getting tossed around everywhere, you know that nothing will ever be graceful. No one will ever be able to react on the fly. Nothing horrifies People Who Say "Agile" A Lot (henceforth, PWSAALs) more than the idea that someone, somewhere, might just be doing work because it needs to be done.

What I see on this survey is a full-throated embrace of everything that stands in between me, a software engineering professional, and my ability to actually do software engineering. I don't want to spend more meetings talking to PWSAALs about the work that needs to be done. I don't want to find an minor but annoying issue with one of our systems, decide to fix it, discover that the process of me getting this issue fixed involves filling out a story-level ticket, filling out a system-level subtask on the story level ticket (all in JIRA, one of the most excrutiatingly, soul-drainingly slow and user-hostile software systems known to humanity), voting on how many arbitrary story points it will cost to do the work, and then hoping that one day, 4 sprints down the line, the Gods Of Workflow Management will smile upon me and my ticket (which I have already spent more effort on than I would spend actually fixing the issue in the first place) will be included in the planned work.

If this is "Agile Maturity" I want nothing to do with it. I want our Agile to be as Immature as possible. Agile Immaturity sounds to me like engineers and PMs and architects spending as little time as possible deciding what work needs to be done, and as much time as possible actually doing said work. It sounds to me like if requirements change on the fly (which they do all the time! and we can't fix that! because requirements come from OEMs and customers and external systems and all of those things can change in whatever way they feel like at any time, completely out of our control) that we just adjust what we're doing to accommodate the new requirements, with a minimum of fuss.

I know the PWSAALs in this company would probably have a lot less to do if we were Agile Immature. That seems like a them problem, and the exact opposite of a problem for literally everyone else in this company. I'm sure if we put our heads to it, we could give them more productive work to do, that doesn't involve wrapping everyone else's job in ever more layers of process and red tape until we all smother in it and turn into a big enterprise software company that takes 17 months to ship a broken single feature upgrade for the simplest app imaginable. I don't want to work at a place like that. I want to work at a place that gets things done, and where the word "agile" makes one think of a gazelle, not a DMV line.