Here is the description of the workshop I ran at XP2006:

Agile methodologies are just as prone to mistakes, deviations and subversion as any other methodology. This workshop is intended to discover and share agile process anti-patterns then discuss and present creative solutions.

Anti-patterns, also referred to as pitfalls, are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems. They are studied, as a category, in order that they may be avoided in the future, and that instances of them may be recognized when investigating non-working systems.

This workshop focuses on participants’ (less than perfect) experiences in the workplace and mines the collective wisdom of the group to come up with creative solutions via a fishbowl process followed by breakout sessions and then group presentations. This is a half day workshop.
A fishbowl is structured conversation technique where a small number of people sit in front of the group (in the fishbowl) and converse with each other. The audience listens and at any time a member of the audience may become a member of the fishbowl, replacing one of the existing members.

I promised that I would post the results of the workshop and I (finally) have them prepared.

Workshop Antipattern List

Session 1

• Coach as manager
• Scrum master is nominated
• Worst employee as scrum master
• Too many stakeholders
• No iteration planning
• Story not really done
• Splitting stories for credit
• Velocity as dial
• Iterate without delivery
• Iterations as checkpoints
• Micro-stories
• Stories to big
• Not enough stories
• Too many meetings
• Unit tests as specification
• Specialist handoff
• Steering because you can
• Refactoring butler/gnome
• Refactoring task/backlog/iteration
• Breaking someone else’s tests
• Rebranding departments as scrum teams
• Desert island teams
• Manager is the product owner/customer
• Tools getting in the way
• Technologist as customer
• Come back when you are done
• Customer proxy believes he is the real customer
• When pairs don’t swap
• Too nice a guy in charge of planning

Session 2

• 0 Velocity Iteration
• Testing after release
• Stabilization iteration
• 80% complete stories
• Customer won’t choose
• Only new stories get worked
• Feedback ignored
• No sprint demos
• Lack of effective acceptance testing