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Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

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Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#21

Post by AnimalMuppet »

At the risk of going "no true Agile" on you: There is nothing about agile that requires spending 4 hours a day in meetings. You're suffering (I believe that is the correct word) under an agile-in-name-only bureaucracy.

Agile can be done well. I've seen it, and it was amazing. I've also seen "agile" implemented where the number of meetings (and the number of forms) keep going up. But the existence of the fake does not disprove the existence of the real. It just means that you have to be very wary of anything bearing the name.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#22

Post by conk »

There’s pros and cons to both approaches. At the end of the day the framework you use won’t make up for serious deficiencies in the product/organization/tech stack. But you can’t ignore benefits with agile over waterfall of delivering small incremental updates quickly, major issues and defects bubble up quicker and can be address before you sink too much time/effor into the product.

This is similar to the lean approach in manufacturing that has been very popular over the past ~20 years.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#23

Post by bamboozled »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #7

> My current company spends 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings. I hate to pull a "no true scottsman", but absolutely nothing about that is being agile. The manifesto says nothing about cargo culting various ceremonies, in fact quite the opposite.

My experience with Agile has been a little bit meeting heavy though, the rituals etc.

It’s a really hard balance to get right and Agile easily ends up turning into a lot of pointless meetings teams feel like they need to have because that’s part of the manifesto they prescribed too.

I’ve also found lot of counselling and explaining starts happening when sprints aren’t going well or people become fatigued.

We could argue it’s not an Agile problem, like everything it’s susceptible to a lot of problems which we like to gloss over because it’s convenient to do so and those who advocate for agile haven’t bothered to revise and improve on the original manifesto to address these weaknesses.

the Agile manifesto is a bit like a bible in that sense.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#24

Post by robmccoll »

No one will get far trying to have a debate here. Agile is both poorly and conflictingly well-defined and its adherents seem to lean on "no true Scotsman" defences when given an example of massive inefficiencies an organization that claims to do it. Whatever you are doing is "agile" if you are performing well and not if you aren't. Also the idea of some pure waterfall is nearly as much of a strawman as the ethereal agile. Measuring performance is also quite difficult. Is it meeting internal or external deadlines? Providing consistent and accurate estimates of time and effort? Providing software of sufficient quality regardless of those measures? Do what works for your team. Make changes if it isn't working.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#25

Post by duncan-donuts »

I’d argue that your previous team was an agile team. My team also has 1 meeting a week where we go over the work for the week, and ask any questions we might have. We do retro like once a month but not always. Depends if we have anything to talk about. We don’t do any Agile™ stuff. I’d say we’re closer to an extreme programming team which has a lot of influence on capital A Agile. At any rate I agree that the type of top-down Agile forced on teams is not good for teams. The only people I can see benefitting are directors. The style I work in keeps everyone but my team in the dark and unless you have a good track record exceeding expectations you might be forced into Agile™

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#26

Post by graiz »

Not an Agile extremist. If done effectively agile is a simple framework for aligning on work, having some cadence for updates and accepting or rejecting work based on quality and alignment.

I personally dislike when it's made significantly more complex. High-performing teams can work in a standard Scrum framework or they can customize agile to suite their needs.

If you're spending hours a day in meetings, you're not using the framework correctly. In a fell-functioning team, you'll spend 5-10min max doing some form of standup, in some teams this is even async so no daily meeting. That leaves one planning meeting every two weeks and one review meeting to see how you've done.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#27

Post by adjkant »

cowtools wrote: post #9
echelon wrote: post #4

> My previous company spent 1 hour every Wednesday talking about whatever urgent items needed to be addressed and then we peaced out for the rest of the week unless anything came up This is agile. > My current company spends 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings. These meetings include: - Stand up - Sprint planning - Retrospective - Refinement - probably 5 others that I’m forgetting This is simply dysfunction. You'r…

Quoted post unavailable.

Commenting this on every post without explaining anything doesn't really do anything but confuse. And the more you do it, the more it appears that your definition of "agile" would be the outlier here. Though as many will tell you, the definition of the process is quite varied.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#28

Post by ricardobeat »

> 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings

Does not sound like agile. Standup is a 15 minute affair, planning & retrospective a once every 2-week (however long your sprints are) event 1-2 hours long. That's all. Roughly 4 hours for every 80 hours of work.

Whatever you have going on there is probably a wild detour off SCRUM inflicted by agile consultants, which seems to be very common these days.

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