"We don't want to follow the agile process..." followed by "why isn't agile working for us?!"
I blame the ambiguous manifesto.
Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
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Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#12I agree that almost all of the orgs I encountered that were Doing Agile were pretty horrible. On the other hand, I've also been in orgs that were very successful in developing software in a way that we would recognise as being agile. We just didn't make a big deal out of it. And we didn't do standups (most of the time), or 2 week sprints, or retrospectives. We didn't even pair consistently: we split up on trivial stu…
Good advice for an experienced team. Couple it with good reporting (who's job is that?) and management could be good with it.
Green teams may need more structure. But the structure should not take over; it should be a tutorial and get rethought as the team matures.
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#13Agile never gave organizations a holistic, viable alternative to Waterfall. Because there’s a difference between theory and practice. Product work is more about practice. When we complain about “AINO” (Agile In Name Only), we’re not being honest with ourselves.
I agree with most of the article. Specially the keep-learning part.
All Agile did was put software development teams unfairly under a microscope.
I believe Agile has been tremendously beneficial for the industry globally, especially in some subtle ways. For example, Agile says you have to communicate a lot, if you want to get software done. Here is the subtlety: if, today, you stop telling the average programmer to communicate, they will stop and go back to silo mode, "naturally". At least some of them. If you think about software at the industry scale, you have to think about a wide population which require processes.
I was once working in a nice little company where, one day, they introduced agile. It was so much beneficial. Before, the bosses thought that talking was simply a lost of productivity. You're a programmer right? So code, don't talk. So we would develop software without talking to each other. After we had daily meetings, scrums things and stuff. Our velocity has sky-rocketed.
You have to realise that before Agile, a fair portion of all software development projects that were started would simply bust and never get shipped. The code is a complete monster or the budget is nuked. When I started in the company I just mentioned, I started working on a codebase that was the worse code I've ever seen in my life. You would touch one line and everything would stop working. It was a condensed piece of spaghetti with hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. Software architecture? That requires some talking and thinking, forget about that, not permitted.
Now I agree with you, agile is not much useful for a hacker who consistently get software done and understand deeply what's happening.
edit: not that I'm an agile guru or anything. Actually I only know the thing superficially. I show up at the meetings, when I'm ask how hard something is, I answer, then I mess around with my office friends. Still I can appreciate it works much better than any process the bosses can come up with.
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#14You don’t hear the name Joel Spolsky much any more, but he was pretty influential in software process thinking in the 90’s - not really for being particularly insightful or original, but more because he was one of the first people who thought of writing a blog about software design. One of his early “observations” about software project management was that “you wouldn’t buy a pair of jeans without knowing how much th…
What's stupid in wanting to get an idea of how much a project costs in order to decide if it's a good idea to pursue, let alonr allocate resources?
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#15You don’t hear the name Joel Spolsky much any more, but he was pretty influential in software process thinking in the 90’s - not really for being particularly insightful or original, but more because he was one of the first people who thought of writing a blog about software design. One of his early “observations” about software project management was that “you wouldn’t buy a pair of jeans without knowing how much th…
Your argument here is against "business". In a dream world, where we could build for building's sake, and create "more perfect" things with no considerations for cost, I'd agree with you, but businesses (in the abstract) are a math function: Does it cost us less to make this than we charge for it? If so, we are a profitable business, if not, we are an unprofitable business.
Managers are there to manage costs, to protect the "business".
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#16I agree that almost all of the orgs I encountered that were Doing Agile were pretty horrible. On the other hand, I've also been in orgs that were very successful in developing software in a way that we would recognise as being agile. We just didn't make a big deal out of it. And we didn't do standups (most of the time), or 2 week sprints, or retrospectives. We didn't even pair consistently: we split up on trivial stu…
What you are describing is exactly what Agile should be. You have a team of people who care about the craft and they slowly improve processes based on real world feedback and experience. If something doesn't work you drop it and try something else. This happens in environments where people respect each other.
Management does not want to hear that software development is a craft. They want it to be a trade, with fungible workers operating in a predictable process with fungible components. The great tragedy of Agile is that it was co-opted as the vehicle of this transformation. It was seized by management, weaponized to other purposes, and then aimed right back at us.
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#17You don’t hear the name Joel Spolsky much any more, but he was pretty influential in software process thinking in the 90’s - not really for being particularly insightful or original, but more because he was one of the first people who thought of writing a blog about software design. One of his early “observations” about software project management was that “you wouldn’t buy a pair of jeans without knowing how much th…
What's stupid in wanting to get an idea of how much a project costs in order to decide if it's a good idea to pursue, let alonr allocate resources?
Nothing, inherently, except perhaps the fallacy of comparing a pair of jeans to the rather chaotic and unpredictable world of bespoke systems development. One is inherently known (a pair of jeans you've presumably already manufactured), the other is one big unknown, basically.
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#18Agile is not science-based, it is an ad hoc bag of techniques that seem to have merit. As such you have to be able to reason about what your practices are and you have to relate everything to concrete business goals.
Your goal should never be to become "more agile". You should be looking to improve efficiency, to make sure you are building the right thing, to improve communication so that everyone is on the same page, etc. "Agile" is never going to magically improve anything.
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar with "culture". Companies with a great culture don't talk much about it, they just get shit done without much fuss and typically have some fun doing it. Because getting shit done is fun. On the other hand, if the company all about how fantastic the culture is...run! Or at least tread very, very carefully.
That reminds me of my two favorite interviewee questions: "What's your company culture like?" - the way that the interviewer responds is a pretty good indicator of what their culture is like. "If someone does something exceptional , how do you reward them?" works in a very similar way.
Maybe even step back to first principles... “Can your company even recognize when someone does something exceptional?”
Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
#20Uncle Bob wrote about this in The Tragedy of Craftsmanship (https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/08/28/Craftsmansh...). His perspective is Agile lost its way once the Project Managers stepped in. It seems to me the problem with Agile in practice today is there's too much focus on process and not enough focus on, you know, the actual software being delivered. Add to that a host of less-than-desirable ideas that have taken hold (don't even get me started on emergent architecture) and you realize modern Agile has become a cesspool.
What to do if you're on an Agile team? There's value in the Lean Methodology. Remember, the whole point was to deliver software your customer needs to fulfill their business objectives. Continually assess your Agile practice and see if what you're doing still makes sense for the project you're working on right now and for the current stage that project is in. This continual assessment with a focus on the end goal of delivering software can go a long way to addressing Agile's modern ills.