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Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

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Re: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

#101

Post by ozim »

lostcolony wrote: post #43
voodootrucker wrote: post #38

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…

Uh, for me sad part is when I try to make those people write stories in more detail like "what should happen if data fails to load", "what should be default state", "Ok we have adding for an element, how we handle deletes". I got question "So should we go back to the waterfall?". Because we are so agile that not everything should be specified up front. But they do not get the scope, single story does not fall into waterfall...

Re: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

#102

Post by fuck_google »

optforfon wrote: post #64
lostcolony wrote: post #25

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…

Perhaps you work at Google? In other companies the definition of done usually covers more than just pushing shit to the CI server.

Re: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

#103

Post by optforfon »

ktRolster wrote: post #84
optforfon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the explanation - that really clarified things for me. The breakdown between story, task, sprint and milestone is very interesting and well thought out. Good estimate generation is the holy grail

Good estimate generation is the holy grail If estimating is what you want to learn, James Shore has some good posts on the topic: http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Agile-and-Predictability.html http://www.jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/estimating.html

Well as a freelancer it's something I've sorta given up hope on being able to do. Thanks again for the information. Hopefully it'll give me some ideas.

Re: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

#104

Post by fuck_google »

morgante wrote: post #93

I stopped reading at "Agile had a great run in it’s youth by taking on some obviously bad practices such as 'Waterfall' software development." Nothing about waterfall is obviously bad. It's how most engineering projects are done. Heck, it's how most projects generally in the world are done. There's a reason it took a long time to move away from waterfall. It solves obvious problems and meshes with how the rest of cor…

The waterfall model (of software development) wasn't even originally (by Herbert D. Benington in 1956) meant to by applied in a strict top-down fashion, but in an incremental and iterative fashion and by making use of prototypes, which has probably always been clear to everyone except clueless managers with no software engineering background. http://sunset.usc.edu/csse/TECHRPTS/1983/usccse83-501/usccse...

Re: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

#107

Post by blowski »

barrkel wrote: post #56
voodootrucker wrote: post #38

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…

If you've got a bunch of good, productive developers, you've got to work really hard to get anything but good software out of them. They will probably self-organise into an effective team, whatever the methodology.

On the other hand, if you have a bunch of inexperienced, mediocre developers (myself included) then "bite-size stories being fed on a conveyer belt" is probably a good way to get productivity out of them. It's certainly a lot better than "you have 3 months to build this enormous system based on this 1 paragraph brief" which is pretty common.

Re: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

#108

Post by moonshinefe »

The problem with these buzz words is it seems most people can't seem to agree on what they mean. This author seems to think continuous delivery replaces agile, case in point.

It'd be nice if people could just layout concrete development / release plans and not assume everyone has the same interpretation for the buzz word that happens to be in vogue for a particular management team.

Oh, you didn't read all those development methodology books?!

I'd sort of like to speak plainly and get programming done, personally.

Re: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery

#110

Post by joeblau »

nessus42 wrote: post #11
ktRolster wrote: post #3

Has anyone ever worked on an 'agile' team that wasn't based around scrum or XP? I'd be interested in hearing your experiences.

Yes, we use Kanban where I work. We've been doing "continuous delivery" and "DevOps" for years. It's not bad, but I still don't really like scrums.

What's "DevOps"?
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