61–70 of 157 posts
Sounds like he is heralding a new age when people just go to work and.... do programming. http://programming-motherfucker.com/ Customer: errr.. what methodology are you following? Developer: none of that agile garbage I can tell you...toxic stuff. I am programming.
- code without purpose is just masturbation
"Continuous Delivery", huh? Yeah, let's replace one consulting fad (the 4 or 5th I've seen in my career, I entered when "Waterfall" was still in vogue, then XP, then Agile, some variations of each too) with another. How about this methodology: http://programming-motherfucker.com/
People tell me that waterfall was never really a thing, and it was only ever a name for how things should not be done and that nobody ever actually advocated it. Is this not true? I'm too young to remember what came before agile.
However, there was a waterfall-like process that was widely used. After getting the reqs and design in place, you started coding and you mostly coded. You would compile as you went along and made sure that your code worked on the handful of tests you put together as you went along. When the app was mostly coded, you then started more serious testing: writing more elaborate tests and verifying functionality. This step often highlighted buried errors that you then spent time debugging, writing additional tests, and so on.
So, the biggest innovation in Agile was the latter's orientation towards developer testing concurrently with coding. Which, of course, has had many other ramifications.
While the old way of doing things might sound klunky by today's standards, when done right it actually worked better than its reputation. Because devs hated spending hours in the debugger, they tended to code very carefully. The concept of "let's code this and run it through some tests to validate it" was unknown. Rather you coded so that you were pretty much sure that what you were writing worked properly if it compiled without error.
"Continuous Delivery", huh? Yeah, let's replace one consulting fad (the 4 or 5th I've seen in my career, I entered when "Waterfall" was still in vogue, then XP, then Agile, some variations of each too) with another. How about this methodology: http://programming-motherfucker.com/
I like how he tries to supplant agile with something that doesn't even attempt to solve the same problems that agile (like waterfall before it) attempts to solve. Both agile and waterfall methods attempt to give you a pattern by which you can predict when software will be delivered. That's the main business value. The suits don't care how the devs operate, provided they can get things on time. Waterfall tried to do t…
The real question is test driven development / continual-integration worth doing? CI isn't too controversial, but for TDD there is no clear answer and it really depends on the domain and what language you work in etc. etc.
I like how he tries to supplant agile with something that doesn't even attempt to solve the same problems that agile (like waterfall before it) attempts to solve. Both agile and waterfall methods attempt to give you a pattern by which you can predict when software will be delivered. That's the main business value. The suits don't care how the devs operate, provided they can get things on time. Waterfall tried to do t…
I'm not a management guru, so I might be off-base but Agile isn't about sprinting tasks. Tasks, broken up enough, are much smaller than a sprint. It's about having a deliverable at a certain short term goal post. You cut corners and smash half finished features together to reach that goal so that you have a product you can pivot around (the word "pivot" always makes me throw up a little - maybe... reassess the direct…
Product owners create stories. These are titled things like "As a (type of user), I want to be able to X". The point of the title is to determine who this actually benefits. Then, they attempt to define it with acceptance criteria. These are a list of "what does it mean to solve this need". Ideally, it implies a set of tasks, and gives a decent starting point for QA to start testing. This is stuff like "When the user clicks X, the system shall Y" and "Should the system fail to do Y, it will instead (failure mode), and (inform the user? Stay silent? Whatever). Sometimes the product owner needs help from the devs to determine this.
The devs will then add tasks to the story. The story should be able to be completed in one sprint; the tasks are, indeed, much faster. They're tracked only insofar as to see progress towards the story's completion, but they're not nearly as important as the story itself. A story with half of its tasks complete is not done; the feature is not implemented, it's not ready to go out. When all the tasks are done, the story is handed off to QA to vet; at that point the story is done, and it can be shipped.
The dev team is only ever committing to what can be done in a sprint. They should have an idea of how many story points they can handle in a sprint, such that they can work with the product owner to determine the stories they'll work on in that sprint.
When the estimates start lining up with what is actually achieved (that is, the team has a velocity of, say, 40 story points per sprint. And they're completing 40 story points per sprint), the product owner can start planning around it. "We have four sprints until the business wants the next milestone. As such, I have assigned 160 points worth of stories to try to get in for that". And that's reasonable. And then, if anything emergent comes up, or new stories take priority (a 'pivot', if you will), the product owner knows they can't manage it; they either need to replace a currently existing story with that emergent/newly prioritized story, or, they need to slip the schedule.
And that can actually work. It requires honesty, transparency, and a desire to actually get shit done, but it can work. The problem is oftentimes people or cultures value CYA, politics, and 'leadership' over getting shit done, and all of those make agile little more than a scapegoat for why everything is on fire.
And it's only one way of being agile. Kanban, for instance, still has stories and tasks as described, and it still offers velocity, though measuring it slightly differently, but it isn't concerned about the sprint boundaries.
I like how he tries to supplant agile with something that doesn't even attempt to solve the same problems that agile (like waterfall before it) attempts to solve. Both agile and waterfall methods attempt to give you a pattern by which you can predict when software will be delivered. That's the main business value. The suits don't care how the devs operate, provided they can get things on time. Waterfall tried to do t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trouble is that in dynamic environments, the discipline necessary to properly practice scrum isn't really possible. It takes longer to define the requirements than it does to code, and once coded they change mid-sprint. The trouble with waterfall is that it tries to predict beyond the scope of a sprint, which just isn't valid. Project estimates are asymmetrical curves (likely poisson?) and you can't add them up a…
"It takes longer to define the requirements than it does to code, and once coded they change mid-sprint" I've experienced one -or- the other of those, rarely both. The only times I've experienced both were due to product owners who wanted to be managers, to bring 'leadership', and so insisted on wasting my time with meetings that didn't actually lead to well defined stories. If I've had a product owner who wasn't a w…
As a product manager who hasn't spoken to any actual users, I'd like the following features to impress my boss.
As a product manager who overheard a Sr Manager muttering something...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trouble is that in dynamic environments, the discipline necessary to properly practice scrum isn't really possible. It takes longer to define the requirements than it does to code, and once coded they change mid-sprint. The trouble with waterfall is that it tries to predict beyond the scope of a sprint, which just isn't valid. Project estimates are asymmetrical curves (likely poisson?) and you can't add them up a…
The trouble with waterfall is that it tries to predict beyond the scope of a sprint, which just isn't valid. This assertion is nonsense. There's nothing magical about a couple of weeks such that it forms a boundary outwith lie impossible predictions. The validity of predictions depend entirely on the understanding of the problem domain and the complexity of the solution space. The single biggest benefit from agile in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People tell me that waterfall was never really a thing, and it was only ever a name for how things should not be done and that nobody ever actually advocated it. Is this not true? I'm too young to remember what came before agile.
Pure waterfall as it's depicted by Agile consultants was never a thing. Think about it, how could you possibly code an entire app and only then debug it? However, there was a waterfall-like process that was widely used. After getting the reqs and design in place, you started coding and you mostly coded. You would compile as you went along and made sure that your code worked on the handful of tests you put together as…
Yes it was.
> Think about it, how could you possibly code an entire app and only then debug it?
Which is why programmers hate waterfall so much, but you're absolutely wrong to think this isn't exactly what was being attempted. Time and time again, management in an attempt to cut the cost of programming time, thought the way to do it was to first build specification for everything and try and prototype the entire app up front, storyboard every screen, build out mountains of specs because naturally they think that's how you build things, with detailed blueprints so all the decisions have already been made. They couldn't be more wrong, but it's certainly the most natural way to think if you aren't a programmer and don't know better.
> So, the biggest innovation in Agile was the latter's orientation towards developer testing concurrently with coding. Which, of course, has had many other ramifications.
Agile in general had nothing to do with testing, the big change in agile was removing the big design up front, the specs and meetings and months spent planning something before being developed. Some agile methods like extreme programming certainly had testing as a big part of their process, but what differentiated agile from waterfall was introducing iterative programming where work was done in short week or two cycles and then delivered whereas waterfall wastes enormous time trying to nail down details that simply ended up being wrong come programming time.
tldr; agile is not about testing, it's about iterative development in short cycles with little planning and always has been and that's what made it different from waterfall; no "Big Design Up Front".