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Scrum is the new waterfall

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Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#31

Post by sopooneo »

kuschku wrote: post #23
badloginagain wrote: post #11

I've been at a few studios, all expounding how they're "Agile! Scrum! Fast-Moving!" And I've seen true "agile" horror shows. Stand-ups consisting of everyone either A) trying to prove they actually did work yesterday in as many words as possible or B) taking this as a chance to have a nice chat with everyone. Hour-long daily stand-ups are not agile. The worst though was the planning meeting for next sprint, where no…

At the university where I am, we were discussing today in one compsci class how agile is something that only works if you don’t care about consistent quality and only care about always having the newest, shiniest, greatest. And how, if you are working on software for ESA, or working for one of the largest internet retailers, or if you’re writing a control software for railway switches, waterfall is the only possible…

Why? What that is written in the Agile Manifesto precludes quality?

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#32

Post by matthewmacleod »

ubernostrum wrote: post #15
cechner wrote: post #2

I don't really agree with this - Scrum isn't really easy to do but in many situations it is the simplest approach to take. If you need to monitor your progress in 'real' terms (i.e., whats actually completed) Scrum is pretty much the minimum ceremony you can get away with in my experience. If you don't need to do that, say if you don't have a deadline that you need to know you wont hit ASAP, then Scrum is likely not…

It sounds like you dont really know what the purpose of scrum is. Unfortunately, every response to "we tried process/technique X and it failed" in this space is ultimately "you didn't understand it" or "you did it wrong". So no true scrum would have... No true Agile shop would have... And where does that get us? It appears that the success rate of people understanding and implementing these things is very close to 0%…

It appears that the success rate of people understanding and implementing these things is very close to 0%

I don't think this is the case. You're likely only hearing about the failures.

Here's a counterpoint – we implemented Scrum. It didn't cause any real issues, increased the speed with which we delivered features to customers, and increased the visibility of everything that was happening both within the development team and within the wider business.

Part of that was having a dedicated individual responsible for managing and implementing that process who made sure that it was actually achieving things we wanted to, rather than being a tick-box exercise, and who isn't afraid to make modifications such that the process better reflects the needs of the team.

In fact, I'd argue that the problem is completely the opposite to what you imply – it's not that people don't implement 'true' agile or 'true' scrum, but that they try to do so, rather than using these systems as a basis for building a development process that works for their team. No true agile team is slavishly adherent to rules that don't work.

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#33

Post by jdbernard »

kuschku wrote: post #23
badloginagain wrote: post #11

I've been at a few studios, all expounding how they're "Agile! Scrum! Fast-Moving!" And I've seen true "agile" horror shows. Stand-ups consisting of everyone either A) trying to prove they actually did work yesterday in as many words as possible or B) taking this as a chance to have a nice chat with everyone. Hour-long daily stand-ups are not agile. The worst though was the planning meeting for next sprint, where no…

At the university where I am, we were discussing today in one compsci class how agile is something that only works if you don’t care about consistent quality and only care about always having the newest, shiniest, greatest. And how, if you are working on software for ESA, or working for one of the largest internet retailers, or if you’re writing a control software for railway switches, waterfall is the only possible…

That's not true. Quality and agile process are almost orthogonal. It is entirely possible to develop extremely high quality software within an agile environment and very possible to develop extremely poor software using waterfall.

Agile doesn't mean "every engineer working on whatever they wanted."

Ultimately quality software results when developers place a priority on writing correct software and when management is truly committed to creating high quality software and all of the expense that includes.

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#34

Post by a3n »

I'm at a small BigCo. We have a few pilot agile projects. Based on what I see them doing, and what I read in the article, it looks like scrums are two week death marches.

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#35

Post by kuschku »

sopooneo wrote: post #31
kuschku wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the university where I am, we were discussing today in one compsci class how agile is something that only works if you don’t care about consistent quality and only care about always having the newest, shiniest, greatest. And how, if you are working on software for ESA, or working for one of the largest internet retailers, or if you’re writing a control software for railway switches, waterfall is the only possible…

Why? What that is written in the Agile Manifesto precludes quality?

> Responding to change over following a plan

Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs.

But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary.

> Working software over comprehensive documentation

If your software is working, but there is no documentation, this might work well for a website, but as soon as you go into control systems for the heating of the ISS, or go into railway control systems, or systems that measure the optimum way of packaging a package at an internet retailer, documentation is everything.

    ----------------
The agile manifesto works kinda, but, to quote a professor, especially the "as long as it works, we don’t need to know what we are doing or have documentation, leads to you carrying all that technical debt around with you all the time".

One of the largest european internet retailers fixed their code quality problems by forcing teams to release all code shared between two teams to be released under Apache License on GitHub. Suddenly developers started caring about code quality, reusability, and maintainability.

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#36

Post by kuschku »

jdbernard wrote: post #33
kuschku wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the university where I am, we were discussing today in one compsci class how agile is something that only works if you don’t care about consistent quality and only care about always having the newest, shiniest, greatest. And how, if you are working on software for ESA, or working for one of the largest internet retailers, or if you’re writing a control software for railway switches, waterfall is the only possible…

That's not true. Quality and agile process are almost orthogonal. It is entirely possible to develop extremely high quality software within an agile environment and very possible to develop extremely poor software using waterfall. Agile doesn't mean "every engineer working on whatever they wanted." Ultimately quality software results when developers place a priority on writing correct software and when management is…

> Working software over comprehensive documentation

> Responding to change over following a plan

These statements from the agile manifesto are directly opposite to any kind of quality software. Documentation and Code Quality are some of the most important features. Your software is not working if it doesn’t exactly match its documentation.

You can live with that in web software, but you’d end in jail if you tried to write security critical systems like that.

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#37

Post by matthewmacleod »

kuschku wrote: post #23
badloginagain wrote: post #11

I've been at a few studios, all expounding how they're "Agile! Scrum! Fast-Moving!" And I've seen true "agile" horror shows. Stand-ups consisting of everyone either A) trying to prove they actually did work yesterday in as many words as possible or B) taking this as a chance to have a nice chat with everyone. Hour-long daily stand-ups are not agile. The worst though was the planning meeting for next sprint, where no…

At the university where I am, we were discussing today in one compsci class how agile is something that only works if you don’t care about consistent quality and only care about always having the newest, shiniest, greatest. And how, if you are working on software for ESA, or working for one of the largest internet retailers, or if you’re writing a control software for railway switches, waterfall is the only possible…

That's all just horribly inaccurate.

There is no aspect of agile development that means that 'quality' (whatever that means!) cannot be delivered.

Forget all of the fancy words and meetings and tools and techniques. At the core, agile development is about breaking work down into manageable, deliverable, testable parts, and being able to flexibly respond to changes in requirements when they inevitably happen – the goal being to ensure you are always building the correct thing.

You're right that this might not be appropriate for some systems – particularly those where there are unavoidable complex, cross-system dependencies that define acceptance. That's fine – traditional engineering approaches are suitable for these cases.

But the idea that agile development is anything to do with "without oversight and every employee was working on whatever they wanted." is a complete nonsense.

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#38

Post by matthewmacleod »

kuschku wrote: post #35
sopooneo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What that is written in the Agile Manifesto precludes quality?

> Responding to change over following a plan Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs. But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary. > Working software over comprehensive documentation If your software is working, but there is no documentation, this might work well for a website, but as soon as you go into control systems…

Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs.

No, it doesn't. Bad management and process leads to that.

But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary.

Totally acceptable and something that can easily be included in agile development.

If your software is working, but there is no documentation

This is not a prerequisite of agile development.

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#39

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #35
sopooneo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What that is written in the Agile Manifesto precludes quality?

> Responding to change over following a plan Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs. But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary. > Working software over comprehensive documentation If your software is working, but there is no documentation, this might work well for a website, but as soon as you go into control systems…

[deleted]

Re: Scrum is the new waterfall

#40

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #35
sopooneo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What that is written in the Agile Manifesto precludes quality?

> Responding to change over following a plan Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs. But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary. > Working software over comprehensive documentation If your software is working, but there is no documentation, this might work well for a website, but as soon as you go into control systems…

[deleted]
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