So, my department at work is moving to agile development. The best way I can easily explain it, it’s breaking down the software development process into small pieces that can be done in short time increments. It’s supposed to be more flexible (ie, “agile!” get it?!) and you find things that are wrong quicker, etc – all in all, it makes perfectly good sense. I think we’ll benefit from it once we get through some of the transition challenges. (Like the fact that QC just ain’t structured for this right now, but we’ll get there, and I get to push for that in a meeting in an hour.)

But hooooo boy, the language choices here are something else. It all screams “white techbro” so badly. (It was first introduced in 2001, and my gawd, does it show.)

I mean, when your core principle/mission statement is called “the agile MANIFESTO” – you know that is not where the weird is going to end.

Then we’ve got more creepy cult language. Grooming. (Ewh.) Ceremony.  Ritual.   Reveal.  Retrospective.

Of course, then some gaming and sports has to be thrown in. Planning Poker. Sprint.  Spike. (No, not volleyball, but mountaineering. Of course.) Scrum. 

Some ableist bullshit in there to boot – “stand up meetings” – where every is supposed to be *standing* to make it move quicker.

And then, in the training, it was mentioned that you’ll hear some Japanese terms here and there, because it was inspired by Toyota’s lean manufacturing principles. Or, the dudes that came up with this were a bunch of fucking weebs.

It’s just so cringy.

And now I have to go to a meeting where I get to be the asshole that says we can’t have an 8 person QC team that can only dedicate 25% of their time to this particular version/module. The answer to the daily “what did you do yesterday/what will you do today” question will be “I had to work on other things” 75% of the time. Let’s just make two people fully dedicated to it with one or two tagged for overflow work – the whole point of this is having a *small* team.

They may regret dragging me into this, LOL.