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Agile Ruined My Life

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Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#61

Post by SoftwareMaven »

api wrote: post #14
dkarl wrote: post #12

Scrum consultants stay way past their usefulness, turning into self-aggrandizing organizational vampires. I think there's something to be said for Scrum, and I think the shock therapy of a period of wholesale dogmatic adoption is the best way to start, with gradual backoff from Scrum dogma only after you appreciate the Scrum way, but goddammit you need to KICK THE CONSULTANTS OUT a few months after adoption and not l…

"Scrum consultants stay way past their usefulness, turning into self-aggrandizing organizational vampires." s/Scrum/Management FTFY.

Do you really believe an organization could function with no management? Can you really not see the wholes that would create?

The programmer attitude of "All management is bad. I'm better than everybody else in the company. I'm the only invaluable person in this organization." gets really old.

EDIT: OK, as pointed out below, I'm an idiot (much nicer than my grouchy post...). I do feel strongly about the anti-management stance, but that was necessarily not what this reply was talking about. My apologies.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#62

Post by pohl »

joe_the_user wrote: post #44
rue wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The name makes sense but that doesn't mean it's not marketing speak.

The marketing speak is often useful when one needs to sell ideas to management who might otherwise default to waterfall. I can tell not many here have been in that situation or there would be more appreciation for the utility of branded ideas.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#63

Post by madhancr »

I think Scrum helps product management more than developers. Good programmers always get stuff done quickly and iteratively. Thats how they become 'good programmers' and thats how most of them naturally work.

To me, making the product owner think about backlogs and stories from an end user perspective is the real benefit of Scrum.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#64

Post by [deleted] »

cageface wrote: post #52
prototype56 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#65

Post by joe_the_user »

"An agile coach should be able to code, perform analysis, manage the project, test -- anything that needs doing on a project."

This kind of statement seems to typify guru-ism. I suppose there are geniuses what can do everything, write your whole project for you in weekend and be done. But eventually these methodology camps will wind-up turning a bunch of fairly average people into consultants, these methodologies need to have these consultants focus on some particular things they are good at and leave the rest to the others.

The best managers I've had didn't try to be programmers. A large project requires coordination and the manager should be there to do that - see what's on and off track, etc.

I don't know if these consultants are supposed to be managers or architects or what. But whatever they are, they're "goodness" needs to be in doing that well, NOT pretending to be so smart they can tell everyone else exactly how to do their job... And, of course, when a given consultant fails, the head guru can excuse the basic by saying "see, he didn't everything about everything so of course things didn't work..."

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#66

Post by gaius »

huherto wrote: post #60
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.

Exactly. IMHO the role of the Scrum Master only really exists during the daily standup. The rest of the time that guy should be coding with everyone else.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#67

Post by joe_the_user »

c00p3r wrote: post #18

When people start selling Agile methods and trying to replace ideas with routines, meetings and paperwork - it is became a scam, of course. But the ideas, on which Agile was built upon - like interviewing experts of the problem domain, extracting and preserving slang and vocabulary from the stories and keeping that terminology through data, code and even a markup by naming the same thing the same name everywhere. Des…

Indeed, it seems rather tragic to see initially good ideas worked into a dogma.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#68

Post by squidsoup »

bmelton wrote: post #40
mikeryan wrote: post #7

Here's how "Agile" has worked for me. Start with a big list of features you wan to implement. Product Owner/Manager keeps list in proper order of importance. Every 2 weeks team gets in a room for 1 hour and marks off what they have done and picks off what needs to be done for the next iteration - generally you try to pick off less work then you think you can do. We'd let you pull in additional work as the "iteration"…

My experience is similar, but based more on Sprints and more frequent, shorter meetings. We also utilized "Post-It Driven Development", meaning that all our tasks were written on post-its, with an estimated time-to-completion (rough, like 2 hours, 8 hours, 2 days, etc.) We would meet for 10 minutes or less each morning, and each person would move their post-its as necessary -- we had 4 columns, not started, started,…

I've been doing "post-it driven development" on my own, using my monitor bezel. It seems to work until the stickiness wears off and the task becomes lost forever. Oh well.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#69

Post by tjpick »

ww520 wrote: post #49
maxawaytoolong wrote: post #9

I'm convinced the main point of scrum is simply so that everyone has to be in the office at 9 or 10 everyday.

Yes. There used to be a manager who would schedule a meeting at 10am everyday with me to force me to come in. I was like fuck this, if I have to work until 11pm/midnight the previous night, I should have a little leeway in coming a bit late the next morning. I don't want someone to babysit my time.

> have to work until 11pm/midnight the previous night

?

Just don't do that then. In at 9, out at 5. No problem, life goes on.

Re: Agile Ruined My Life

#70

Post by EdiX »

lionhearted wrote: post #17

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I think that ad was ironically topical
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