Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#111

Post by unreal37 » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #96

geezerjay wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"How long will X take?" "I don't know, I've never done X before." "Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be perfect analysis, just a rough idea for scheduling. Not written in stone, ha ha." "Uh, a week?" "Okay, great, so if I say 8 days you should have it done by then?" "Yeah, I hope so." "Great, thanks." Day 3: actually doing X requires unforeseen Y and Z which will each take a month. "We need to add Y and Z to the schedul…

"A week" is a terrible estimate for complex things that have components that you can't foresee. If you lose "a day" on some problem outside of your control (compiling starts to fail and it turns out someone checked in some code into your branch by mistake), you've basically wasted 20% of your estimate.

Never say a week when there's the chance something will require a month because you didn't understand it.

You need to learn this lesson. A week is a blink of an eye in software, and only things you understand take a week.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#112

Post by rayanm » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

Agile was dead to me when I finished my PhD and joined a company that paid a Scrum consultant more than they paid me to help us move tickets without knowing what was the project about.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#113

Post by Bartweiss » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #79

quadcore wrote: post #13

Agile 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 Ag…

Agile is like AI. To the cynics, anything that works isn't Agile.

Eh? I'd compare it to No True Scotsman, not AI: I mostly hear people insist that anything which doesn't work isn't Agile.

I'm extremely grateful for the changes agile wrought on the software industry, and while I think many of the best insights have become commonplace, I don't think formal Agile methods are outdated or exhausted yet. But I do think formal Agile is extremely hard to do right, and has very common failure modes of knowingly-unrealistic planning, unproductive meetings, excess design changes, and tech debt neglected to ship MVPs.

One measure of a methodology is how much value it provides when it's used right, and I agree that Agile shines here. But it's also worth asking how easy a method is to get right, and how gracefully it devolves when things aren't perfect. My experience is that agile advocates commonly neglect those parts, dismissing widespread frustration with 'bad agile' on the basis that if it had been implemented perfectly, those issues wouldn't have come up.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#114

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

> let’s stop pretending Agile was some sort of cure all

But we won't. That's why snake oil salesmen were so effective: we want to believe in the cure-all. No matter how often you chastise, people'll keep buying it, because they're aspirational. They want there to be greener grass on the other side, and they're willing to try anything to find it.

The business doesn't actually care about Agile at all. It just has heard of the term and realized it has something to do with getting work done better. So leadership will say things like "We're an Agile organization now", not having the faintest idea what that means. A snake oil salesman doesn't need to know how snake oil works; he only needs to know what it promises, and how to sell it.

You can have the perfect software development methodology and people will still do it wrong. But if everyone has the same goal in mind, is highly motivated, and is willing to cross aisles to work with other people to do the best job possible, a methodology will naturally arise. Self-motivating humans can get some crazy shit done. The best working organizations I've ever seen followed no methodology. They just did what was needed to keep a site running well and making money, and it was kind of wonderous.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#115

Post by unreal37 » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #41

"It’s just that everyone does Agile wrong." Not everyone. Some are very successful with it. The problem is that everybody wants to copy that success and tries to cargo cult themselves through it without understanding it. "let’s stop pretending Agile was some sort of cure all." That's certainly good advice. Agile is more of an attitude than a solution, and attitude is not going to solve all your problems. Even if you…

I agree with a lot of what you said.

My last company (before going self-employed) had an agile environment and it was mostly a good system to work in.

I don't recognize the fairly strictly Agile (not AINO) environment I worked in in that article. Not perfect, but it worked and better than a lot of places that had no good methodology.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#116

Post by ff317 » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

me_again wrote: post #39

I have a theory that commercially successful software development methodologies are like diets: they have to be almost impossible to follow. This ensures that when you fail to lose weight/achieve bug free software, you blame yourself for not following the rules exactly, rather than the rules for not working.

That's probably a very apt metaphor, but there's an upside too: many diets actually do at least temporarily help people in spite of their irrational basis, just because $random_diet causes the dieter to observe and reflect on their eating habits more carefully in general. Even a non-sense diet like "eat only foods colored yellow or red" probably does a lot of people a lot of good, compared to their usual state of being completely unconscious of their awful habits. Same goes for software development practices.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#117

Post by unreal37 » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #54

Ah, yes, the old "you're not doing it right, so read these 3 books and follow 10 bloggers every day" argument.

That was the weirdest part. "How many books do you read? Go read more books."

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#118

Post by asses-in-chairs » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

Honestly, I'd rather kill myself than be subject to a daily groupthink circle jerk.

I'm not interested in doing this shit before noon. But really, the entire day is ruined by a daily firing squad.

Please fuck off, and find another reason to talk to me. Asses in chairs management is bullshit. This is just cover to make sure I show up before 10AM. I don't care about your roll call. The subway is crowded with pieces of shit, and I'll pass through it on my own time. If you cared, you wouldn't delegate QA to morons. You'd take an active roll in getting shit done, and you'd know as much about the technical internals as any engineer, and understand why things are the way they are, without resorting to brainless rituals.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#119

Post by Zenbit_UX » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #2

I 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…

Got any insight as to why TDD is such a great thing?

From how Ive heard it described it seems to be a way for management to impose rules on how developers can approach writing a feature and not necessarily a benefit to the devs.

If I understand it properly, it's essentially write a test so it fails then fill in the feature gap. The whole write first bit is just so you don't have to retest later to verify that your test didn't hit a false positive, right? Something a careful person would check anyways...

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#120

Post by ryanmarsh » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

curtis wrote: post #67

Any software development methodology or process is going to come up short if it ignores the fundamental nature of software development, which is: We do not know what we're doing until we do. Any process or methodology that tries to extract promises out of the software development organization about things that are still in the we do not know what we're doing phase is going to result in disappointment at best and seri…

We do not know what we're doing until we do

Ironic that so many Agile coaches like to bandy about Dave Snowden's Cynefin and then act entirely opposite of what it recommends.