I'm a rather experienced software developer. I worked with many teams and projects throughout my career so far. The recent two projects, however, challenged me in an unusual way. Namely: they were disorganized, or rather organized in a way that I perceive as not effective.

Both of the projects are for the banking industry. They showed some surprising similarities:

• full-fledged Scrum (I mean - planning, refinements, retrospective)
• big teams (9-15 team members)
• no mockups before development
• 20-25% of the developer's time spent on the meetings
• developers assigned to work on something they lack expertise about (React devs assigned to Angular, .NET devs assigned to React)
• low quality of backlog and functional requirements
• superficial code reviews (pointing out if you forget to delete commented out code, but nevermind that code is not clean, names are bad and there are no unit tests)
• low developer's productivity
• missed deadlines
• poor quality of code

In case of the first project I tried to convince the team to reorganize, I suggested to split (it was at first around 12 people, later became 18 and more even), I wanted to convince them that we must have mockups first and should reduce the number and/or length of the meetings. Unfortunately, all the requests and suggestions have been rejected. They just said - 'it is what it is', 'we won't be able to fix the situation', 'we always worked that way'.

Finally, after a few attempts to fix the project and improve it - I quit.

The second project shows the same symptoms at this moment and I don't want it to fail, but I see the same patterns emerge.

I'd like to ask you for a piece of advice. How do you harness the chaos within the development team? How do you convince the team to follow the well known good principles? Is it possible at all, or maybe some organizations will always produce such an environment? If it's impossible to fix such a team - how do you convince yourselves to work in a team which you know works ineffectively and against the good principles?

I'm a rather experienced software developer. I worked with many teams and projects throughout my career so far. The recent two projects, however, challenged me in an unusual way. Namely: they were disorganized, or rather organized in a way that I perceive as not effective.

Both of the projects are for the banking industry. They showed some surprising similarities:

• full-fledged Scrum (I mean - planning, refinements, retrospective)
• big teams (9-15 team members)
• no mockups before development
• 20-25% of the developer's time spent on the meetings
• developers assigned to work on something they lack expertise about (React devs assigned to Angular, .NET devs assigned to React)
• low quality of backlog and functional requirements
• superficial code reviews (pointing out if you forget to delete commented out code, but nevermind that code is not clean, names are bad and there are no unit tests)
• low developer's productivity
• missed deadlines
• poor quality of code

In case of the first project I tried to convince the team to reorganize, I suggested to split (it was at first around 12 people, later became 18 and more even), I wanted to convince them that we must have mockups first and should reduce the number and/or length of the meetings. Unfortunately, all the requests and suggestions have been rejected. They just said - 'it is what it is', 'we won't be able to fix the situation', 'we always worked that way'.

Finally, after a few attempts to fix the project and improve it - I quit.

The second project shows the same symptoms at this moment and I don't want it to fail, but I see the same patterns emerge.

How do you harness the chaos within the development team? How do you convince the team to follow the well known good principles? Is it possible at all, or maybe some organizations will always produce such an environment? If it's impossible to fix such a team - how do you convince yourselves to work in a team which you know works ineffectively and against the good principles?