Do you practice BDSA?

I get to visit a lot of teams. I talk to my peers about their experiences too. For every agile success story there seem to be a load of less happy outcomes.

There are three common ways that I’ve seen agile ‘adoption’ go wrong, and they are:

• Bondage – “You can never change the business. That’s just the way things work here.”
• Domination – “That estimate is too big – make it smaller. These tasks are assigned to you.”
• Sadism – “Work longer hours. Honour your commitments. Of course you will work on multiple projects”

If these sound familiar, then maybe your organisation uses BDSA – Bondage, domination and sado-agile.