Agile isn't Agile Anymore: It's Just a Buzzword Now

A project manager recently brought me into a short term, major project. The PM wanted the team to use a process and she wanted to use some form of Agile. Which I think was the reason I got the contract.

We discussed the form of Agile she wanted to do and I devised and VISOed (yeah, that's a word now) the process in short, simple steps.

The Devs were all over it. Loving the fact there would be honest-to-gosh written requirements.

So the first week I had the audacity of talking to a developer for all of 15 minutes getting a baaseline on a particularly clumsy feature.

I was told not to talk to the developers because the time zoomed up to two hours and this was "non-productive" time.

I asked a question in one of the meetings with a business stakeholder. This resulted in me no longer having direct access to the business.

Each kick-off had the devs reading the user stories for the upcoming sprint during the  kick-off. Since I didn't have any real contact with anyone other than the PM, my ardent request for the dev team to take a half day to read the user stories and funnel in the questions and suggestions to me for correction or change never happened.

The stand-up meetings often had developers working out problems making the call 30-45 minutes long. Yes, I told them to tell the rest of use what they did the day before, what they were going to do today and describe any obstacle. No minutes, no punch list, no accountability until the kick-off of the next sprint.

We did exactly one retrospective. SO there was no process improvement.

Had I been able to talk to the developers, Epics would have been identified before they reached the Proposed Features List for the next sprint. As a result, there were 8 user stories that spanned not one, not two, but three or more sprints. This made the burn-down chart an idiotic tool of no use. Yes, I posted it to the wiki Sprint Page anyway.

There was no 'alpha' testing after a feature was completed because I didn't have access to the latest build. The code was supposed to be integrated and regression tested for each build (.Net environment using JQuery) for the supported browsers, but we got feedback that some features didn't work in IE (all of us appeared to use Firefox and only Firefox except for the designer who wasn't testing.

The outsourced UAT Team (none of whom I was able to speak to) was supposed to take the user stories and test each Acceptance Criteria (user story test),