 Hi, I'm Geoff Watts and welcome back to my series of agile interview questions Where I take on a question that could or perhaps does come up in an agile interview and try and give my perspective on it To help people who may well be going for jobs in the agile world or even people who are looking to hire in the agile world And what kind of things they might want to look out for Well, this is the third episode and today's question comes from somebody who wants to remain anonymous So we'll call them Kenneth and they were asked a question in an interview which was quite tough and So I thought well, let's give it a go and that question is what's your least favorite thing about agile? And that's quite tough really when you put on the spot It reminds me of going back to school days when you had to go into a class debate or something And you had to argue against something that you really really liked But it's important to be able to see a number both sides to an argument and to be able to see well What are the pitfalls? What are the things that aren't particularly good? Just not just from your perspective put also from others perspectives What else what they what they might not like about an agile approach? My initial gut response was that it's a little bit like going to the gym And going to the gym is like a drug for me because I don't do drugs But in all seriousness the amount of discipline involved in going to the gym and doing that exercise routine and getting into a healthy habit and doing these things on a regular basis That's really really difficult agile is a tough thing to do well because of the amount of discipline that goes involved into making it work Not just from a from a product on a perspective in terms of the discipline of making regular decisions and collaborating with the team on a regular basis It's reviewing giving feedback on a regular basis But from an engineering perspective building something iteratively and incrementally and not over delivering not over complicating things But also making sure that it works that it's done done done Continuously paying attention to technical excellence and good design all those things are really really difficult Evolving and emerging the architecture and the infrastructure and the requirements and the designs these are all really difficult practices And that's not even talking about the actual coding practices Perhaps something like test-driven development continuous integration continuous refactoring things like that. They're all really difficult habits to get into But without them you can be doing agile in name, but not necessarily very well As I say, it's very easy to build rubbish quickly and it's very easy to iterate yourself into a hole So the discipline coupled with the fact that I have a strong people Please a trait means that I find it really difficult to be someone who's partly or solely responsible For bringing in a way of working that's actually going to require other people To be very disciplined and do the hard stuff on a continual basis I don't like telling anybody else. They've got to go to the gym Or even being responsible for the fact that they need to go to the gym So that's that that's that will be my initial gut response but when Kenneth asked me this question my my automatic response was to ask them what they said in their interview and Their response was the word itself, which I thought was quite a clever response really because the word agile itself has been Very misused very overused person perhaps even abused over the years from the early days of agile where you'd quite often hear things like We're agile, so we don't need to do documentation or we're agile, so we don't need to plan or You're supposed to be agile and respond to change welcoming change So here you go here's a change for you do it all the way through to things like right now Which is at the idea that agile is the right thing to do and the whole company should be going agile or being agile or doing agile and so the word itself has become loaded and And how it brings to mind some less than Consistent and perhaps even less than pleasant imagery for people now while there are a lot of benefits to an agile approach It shouldn't ever be applied in a sort of blanket fashion blindly without consideration of the context so for example, there will be times when actually a lot more upfront planning and a lot more deliberation Would be the right thing to do as because it would help you avoid a lot of the waste that could be introduced by an iterative Incremental approach when actually the right answer is possible to be worked out in fact that reminds me I did a video while I'll link it in the description I'll try and get a little link in the in the video yourself that you can click on if I can work that out at a Technical level and then there I'm talking about the situations where you might want to think Whether scrum is the right thing or whether agile itself is the right thing to be doing in that particular context But mentioning scrum. There's there are other agile flavors of that other agile forms and sometimes can that might be more appropriate than scrum so on a recent episode of the agile podcast and again, I'll try and I'll put a description a link to that in the Description maybe even link it in the video itself. Who knows we'll see what I can do But in a recent episode, we did a live Pubcast in my hometown of Cheltenham and it was effectively a Q&A session with with an audience And one of the questions that Paul got out and I were asked was what what do we think the future of agile is and my Response that was that I don't think the future is agile per se but more around resilience and coherence and So that's a big part of what I'm helping leadership teams and agile coaches with at the moment is trying to find out the right context and Help the organization become more Agile with a small a if you like so we're helping people with what we call organic agility, which is a lot more contextual It's it's a lot more built around obtaining coherence and resilience You know, I'm probably put a link to that in the description. It's not so much about Lining up to the Agile Manifesto even because agility in this context is about how the organization Team individual be a lot more nimble and responsive when it comes to processes organizational structures even the organizational culture to become and maintain its relevance its resilience and in many cases its actual continued existence Because if you go too far down the wrong path It's very easy for you an organization to go out of business very quickly these days So I guess what I've come to as a result of this ramble is that my least favorite thing about agile is The word with a capital a it shouldn't ever be dogma. It shouldn't ever be evangelical. It shouldn't be a weapon wielded blindly But having said all that none of those should be an excuse for not going to the gym Either metaphorically or literally I Hope you found this useful and if you've got any more agile interview questions You can either leave them in the comments field and I'll try to address them or if you like send me a message privately. You can find my details Inspect an adapt calm You'd rather remain anonymous like Kenneth, but thanks to Kenneth for the prompt appreciate that and if you've got an interview coming up Best of luck