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Agile Ruined My Life

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Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#51

Post by prototype56 »

cageface wrote: post #29
api wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Every…

We have a lot of decent developers on our team. But management is still stuck in 90's where everything is done as huge framework building waterfall exercise. The word YAGNI doesnt mean anything to anyone here. So yea lot of skilled devs are writing useless frameworks when they could have producing real business value. So I would say the most important thing is the process once you have a decently skilled team.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#52

Post by cageface »

prototype56 wrote: post #51
cageface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Every…

We have a lot of decent developers on our team. But management is still stuck in 90's where everything is done as huge framework building waterfall exercise. The word YAGNI doesnt mean anything to anyone here. So yea lot of skilled devs are writing useless frameworks when they could have producing real business value. So I would say the most important thing is the process once you have a decently skilled team.

Yeah that list only holds for successful projects. A broken process can quickly move to the top of the list of reasons for failure.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#53

Post by chromatic »

cageface wrote: post #29
api wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Every…

You left out #0, which is "Knowing what to build." I suppose discovering that is in the realm of #4. Hm.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#54

Post by [deleted] »

rue wrote: post #33
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…

The name probably makes more sense for people who wrote software before it came about. Even "non-agile" development processes have evolved in response in the last 8 or so years.

[deleted]

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#55

Post by Retric »

cageface wrote: post #27
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".

Most of these approaches are far older than 8 years. But, large companies often have an “education budget” and there is an industry that repackages old ideas, gives them a shiny name, and sells them for a respectable profit.

EX: Pair programming is very natural in a collage or contest setting. You often see people just default to that mode when under time constraints.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#56

Post by tieTYT »

j_baker wrote: post #38

You know, I'm really beginning to regard the "Agile is led by consultants who don't know what they're doing" and "TDD is a crutch for beginners" crowds as being like the Rush Limbaughs of programming. There's a grain of truth to their points of view, but that's it: just a grain. They get their strength just from being loud enough to make people notice. To be fair though, I think of the Bob Martins out there as being…

"Can't we all just accept that different people work different ways rather than being constantly at each others' throats?"

We could if we all worked on one-man projects where you are the only one that reads the code that you write. The reality of the situation is, one day someone else will need to understand and modify your code. If you're inconsiderate about your coding style, then I would say, "No, I can't accept that you work in a different way".

Furthermore, given the choice and all things being equal, I'd rather work on the project that has a huge test suite than the one without it. From my perspective, I'd say the programmer who wrote that test suite is the more considerate programmer.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#57

Post by api »

chromatic wrote: post #53
cageface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Every…

You left out #0, which is "Knowing what to build." I suppose discovering that is in the realm of #4. Hm.

No, discovering that is market research. I don't see how McMethodologies help there.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#58

Post by tieTYT »

rbranson wrote: post #5

All of the "heavy" agiles like Scrum have confused me: isn't agile about fundamentally less process and more flexibility? One can't serve two masters. Teams have to pick a point along the completely structured - completely flexible line. As far as I'm concerned, these flavors of agile are just wolves in sheep's clothing that allow existing waterfall autocrats to continue their reign under the guise of adopting "agile…

It's all relative. For example, the reason you have daily 15 minute meetings is because lots of companies had daily 1+ hour meetings. I believe scrum originated from trying to fix companies that were doing things unbelievably bad. From that perspective, it's a lot less process than before.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#59

Post by chromatic »

api wrote: post #57
chromatic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out #0, which is "Knowing what to build." I suppose discovering that is in the realm of #4. Hm.

No, discovering that is market research. I don't see how McMethodologies help there.

That sounds like an assumption that everyone's in the business of selling software. I'm certainly not.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#60

Post by huherto »

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…

yes, and the worst part is when the pointy haired bosses become Agile experts and start to look down on software developers. They couldn't write an application even to save their lives but now they feel they are the experts and try to manage the developers.
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