Scrum is a child play compare to what happens when
organization gets Six Sigma like stuff introduced through.
Scrum Master as scamster !? Big deal! How about whole management tree getting additional clones - green, brown, black belts - who put their extremely empowered, yet clumsy and arrogant, hands and noses into and messing with everything? After having lived through such thing, a mild degree scrum feels just like a fly spec, a minimally necessary sacrifice to blood thirsty Gods of Office Space.
Agile Ruined My Life
71–80 of 137 posts
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#72Implementing 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…
You know what one of the core values of Agile is? People over process.
For fuck sake, the reason the Agile Manifesto came into being in the first place because the people writing it, the people who created various methodologies now known as "Agile", agreed that there was no ONE TRUE WAY, just a set a values they shared. Each and every one of them would agree with you.
This willful misunderstanding of agile is just pathetic. It's like listing to teabaggers going on about death panels.
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#73In the 90s CMM and Cleanroom Engineering were popular.
Believe me. That wasn't better.
Then came this thing called RAD (Rapid Application Development) driven by a new set of tools such as Visual Basic.
That wasn't better either.
Extreme Programming was a breath of fresh air but Fred Brooks was right. There's no silver bullet.
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#74As 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…
Eric S. Raymond accurately characterized Agile when he described it as repackaging the things hackers do anyway, in a way that can be sold to non-hackers.
Maybe you don't want to be sold a product. You're not the target audience for Agile Methodology(tm). The MBA and Tim Robbins crowd are.
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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-manageme…
Most management is bad, because most managers treat the function of 'management' as a separate domain/skill. Really, management is a combination of good people skills and a strong understanding of your product development & market.
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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-manageme…
If you do the substitution, you get "management consultants," not "management." I think it's a valid statement. Business always needs management, but management consultants are only good for helping a business solve a particular problem or get through a particular change. Then they should get out of the way. Instead, they work their way up somebody's butt and sit there pulling checks, wielding unaccountable power that is inappropriate for their place in the reporting structure.
It goes like this:
1. People do what the consultants say because hey, you're supposed to be learning from them. It makes sense.
2. Some recalcitrant people refuse to go along with any changes, and upper management puts out the word: "We're paying good money for these consultants. On my authority, do what they say." This still makes sense.
3. The consultants start meddling in things outside their original brief, just because they think they're smart and want to prove it. People have to live with it, so the consultants are gradually accepted as a generic part of the power landscape. This is the beginning of the pathology.
4. The consultants continue wielding power in a disruptive way as long as they can, because if the organization doesn't need their constant correction, somebody might realize it's time to get rid of them. This is the full-blown pathology: consultants actively disrupting productive work because it's the best way for them to stay employed.
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#77In general I think it's wise to beware of gurus peddling software development methodologies. This doesn't mean that there aren't good practices which can improve the process, but all too often the gurus are not applying a proper quantitative analysis to their methodology to judge its relative efficacy, and instead rely very unscientifically on feelgood anecdotes and difficult to falsify assertions.
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're forgetting it because they want to forget it. Businessmen want (for reasons that are somewhat rational) to commoditize everything, including labor. Programming labor has been stubbornly difficult to commoditize. Programmers differ in skill in very deep and complex ways, and can't just be swapped out like assembly line workers. This is immensely frustrating to the bean counters. Anything that comes along and p…
Exactly. Agile becomes popular because it gives managers wetdream to impose a factory-like process into software development.
Not to mention that it appears to eliminate the long "measuring before you cut" thing at the start of new projects. Fingers on keyboards equals productivity!
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're forgetting it because they want to forget it. Businessmen want (for reasons that are somewhat rational) to commoditize everything, including labor. Programming labor has been stubbornly difficult to commoditize. Programmers differ in skill in very deep and complex ways, and can't just be swapped out like assembly line workers. This is immensely frustrating to the bean counters. Anything that comes along and p…
Exactly. Agile becomes popular because it gives managers wetdream to impose a factory-like process into software development.
I met a ScrumMaster that sees things otherwise.
The point of Agile (and Scrum) is to give responsibility back to the clients/managers: pick one -> time or money, you can't have both; we'll show you why from our user-stories, cards, task-boards, poker-game, scrum planning, etc.
Re: Agile Ruined My Life
#80I'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.
Point out that in most agile books, people should not work overtime. :)