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Agile Ruined My Life

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Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#21

Post by haze »

lzw wrote: post #2

Implementing scrum turned our team from productive and mostly free of overhead to overbearing, involving a lot of long ass meetings (all meetings are long if you have to stand) and produced a lot of additional confusion. The interesting thing is that previously, with our specs and our so-called waterfall approach were were more agile. It happened naturally as we naturally did incremental development and we naturally…

Being Agile has become a fad off late. This has led to team adopting agile blindly doing things without understanding the reason or need behind it. This could lead to frustration mentioned by you involving a lot of long ass meetings standing.

I believe as mentioned in the article that Agile is a set of best practices followed by a ever adaptive team. I completely agree there is in no ONE TRUE WAY.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#23

Post by aneth »

Interesting to see the present backlash against agile and TDD. As an independent developer, I can pick and choose what works.

I can say honestly they are both really useful concepts filled with great tools, but I am not an expert on either. TDD has saved my life a number of times. I have seen lots of tragedies averted and productive discussions because of "scrums."

When process takes over function in any environment, innovation and motivation will be squashed.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#25

Post by gojomo »

My sense is that the 'agile' label is not for a specific process or place-in-the-solution-space but for a direction.

It's a direction that's the opposite of many big company dynamics that can impede software productivity. It's also a direction that's opposite some proclivities of otherwise strong and well-meaning programmers, who nonetheless try to achieve certainty too soon in an ongoing, exploratory project.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#26

Post by icfantv »

i read the comments here and wonder if the problems people are expressing here about agile are actually caused by agile, or rather, the people implementing agile?

my money's on the latter. agile, like any process, can be abused by those who don't understand or are too process-oriented.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#27

Post by cageface »

Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #10

As a young software developper, what really bores me with Agile, is the name, the shiny box you put things into, where it should just be named "Good practices for software developement". It's the mentality of selling things as products, with some kind of prebuilt ideology and aesthetic built along with the core, that really makes me run far far away. I don't want to be sold a product. The fact that it led people to t…

Exactly. It reeks of buzzwords and consultant speak. Every brush I've had with an agile evangelist felt like a scene from "The Office".

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#28

Post by efsavage »

Agile/Scrum/whatever consultant engagements should be measured in hours, not days or weeks. Do a workshop on TDD or optimizing your standups, but if a team is being so badly mismanaged that full-time babysitting is neeeded, they need to replace their management, not add to it.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#29

Post by cageface »

api wrote: post #16
lzw wrote: post #2

Implementing scrum turned our team from productive and mostly free of overhead to overbearing, involving a lot of long ass meetings (all meetings are long if you have to stand) and produced a lot of additional confusion. The interesting thing is that previously, with our specs and our so-called waterfall approach were were more agile. It happened naturally as we naturally did incremental development and we naturally…

The biggest determinant of success that I've seen is the skill of the programmers on the team. No McMethodology can make crappy programmers write good code. Period. (However, really bad management can make good programmers write crappy code too...)

Exactly!

Factors contributing to the success of a development project, in decreasing order of importance:

1. the skill of the team

2. the determination of the team to succeed

3. appropriate choice of technologies

4. process

In my experience management agendas are much more likely to interfere with 1-4 than to help. There needs to be some kind of hippocratic oath for development managers and process enthusiasts. Everybody pays lip service to Fred Brooks but people somehow seem to keep forgetting his message.

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