Declared agility and lack of real agility

[Vidmantas Maskoliunas]

Hello, Colleagues,

The situation:
a company declares its best sentiments for agility, quick and collaborative work and drums that scrum is widely used (in our team it is, or at least some practices of Scrum like sprint planning, daily meetings and sprint backlogs).
Now a manager suddenly asks to start monitoring deliveries to all levels of environments (development/test/verification/integration/acceptance/production). Each delivery action have to be described in a spreadsheet with all related information (date/component/what's new/dislocation of code in SCM etc). There are days full of delivering to the development server, so in my opinion that clearly contradicts the spirit of agility (assume that making a new journal entry takes 10-15 minutes). A good SCM is used properly, so people put their comments about changes together with code check-ins.

What do you think about that? Is it reasonable to extensively maintain changes in all environments or, let's say, acceptance/production is enough?

What is your experience here?

Thank you for all ideas.

[David Newton]

Just because a company says they believe in agile doesn't mean than every little process will be agile, and it *is* important to know what's on what machine. If you've had good source control discipline then use it somehow to create those reports automatically.

[Ilja Preuss]

Vidmantas Maskoliunas wrote:(in our team it is, or at least some practices of Scrum like sprint planning, daily meetings and sprint backlogs).

Those are nice practices, and still using them doesn't mean you are doing Scrum.

At the heart of Scrum, there are three principles:

* deliver tested, running software at least every month
* ask the team
* inspect and adapt

(This is how Alistair Cockburn teaches it. I can highly recommend his course.)

Now a manager suddenly asks to start monitoring deliveries to all levels of environments (development/test/verification/integration/acceptance/production). Each delivery action have to be described in a spreadsheet with all related information (date/component/what's new/dislocation of code in SCM etc). There are days full of delivering to the development server, so in my opinion that clearly contradicts the spirit of agility (assume that making a new journal entry takes 10-15 minutes). A good SCM is used properly, so people put their comments about changes together with code check-ins.

What do you think about that?

If your company were really doing Scrum, that manager would have come to the teams, explained what value for the business he is looking for (that is, why does he want you to do that), and then asked you to come up with a solution.

Is it reasonable to extensively maintain changes in all environments or, let's say, acceptance/production is enough?

Whether that's a reasonable thing to do depends on what the problem is it's supposed to solve. What is the problem?