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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

#71

Post by nso95 »

projectileboy wrote: post #38
justinator wrote: post #20

"Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried" I feel the same may be true w/Agile.

Exactly. When people say “agile sucks!” I always want to ask “compared to what?” Engineers who say that they meet for a few minutes once a week and then everyone somehow just knows what to do… frankly I call bullshit. That may work at a 5 person startup, but as soon as you have 100 people, you’re going to have a lot of programmers writing code who are sure they know what’s best but in fact have no idea how their work…

A spec

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

#72

Post by davidthewatson »

Eating print on camera certainly qualifies you as being on-par with Werner Herzog who ate his shoe on camera.

The problem with classifying the need for lightweight methods as an "agile" problem is that agile has become the dogma that it set out to replace twenty years ago. Let that sink in. The word agile divides the room and that's part of the problem with cliched corporate speak.

As a result, there is no more confusing argument in software process today than agile because we do not have consensus on its meaning. At best, defining agile is a choice paradox. This is a result of the spectrum from little a agile (actual agility) to Big A Agile (fake corporate agile) where the pointy haired boss tells you to select from a cargo cult of overly complex choices, all of which are bad. My experience has been that teams that wind up at real agile wind up there because they weren't worried about defining a cornucopia of cliched agile speak prior to moving forward and instead did a lean build-measure-learn cycle and just figured it out as a series of continuous improvement iterations whereas fake agile stems from trying to do what some other unicorn says works for them, failing, and never getting it right because there is no cycle of action learning and reflection. tldr; it doesn't actually matter what words you use to describe the gyrations, what matters is that the gyrations work for you and your team and produce the results the team desires.

FWIW, most of what I've said is supported in the research and publishing of Alistair Cockburn who was there when it all began twenty years ago and wrote Crystal Clear. The other academic I'd reference who has the done the work and arrives at what I believe are the correct conclusions is Allen Holub.

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

#73

Post by Volundr »

anonymoushn wrote: post #54
adjkant wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so, but it's varied across size and industry and matches with my friends experience in other broad areas. So I guess let's reframe: what is my meeting load estimate (the 4 hour a week high side) missing? How does that get to 4 hours a day, and if not there, what is the maximum? To be clear, that's not to say that other meetings can't be used, but that they are not part of the "agile" process. I can easily imagi…

It's easy to get to 4 hours a week of only standups.

If your running strict scrum your stand-ups should be 15 minutes. In my current company as well as my last role that'd be a long stand. They were usually closer to 5.

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

#74

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

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.

True, there's a problem with the way it's implemented. But developers rarely have a choice on how PMs manage their projects. Agile just doesn't work for long term projects. It leads to junk code that developers hope they will fix later or long hours for them trying to meet deadlines. A lot of the time it's both.

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

#75

Post by projectileboy »

nso95 wrote: post #71
projectileboy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. When people say “agile sucks!” I always want to ask “compared to what?” Engineers who say that they meet for a few minutes once a week and then everyone somehow just knows what to do… frankly I call bullshit. That may work at a 5 person startup, but as soon as you have 100 people, you’re going to have a lot of programmers writing code who are sure they know what’s best but in fact have no idea how their work…

A spec

Well… yes. And the spec is perfect, right?

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

#77

Post by koonsolo »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #74
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.

True, there's a problem with the way it's implemented. But developers rarely have a choice on how PMs manage their projects. Agile just doesn't work for long term projects. It leads to junk code that developers hope they will fix later or long hours for them trying to meet deadlines. A lot of the time it's both.

If you say "Project Manager", I'm already suspicious that you're actually doing agile. The most popular agile framework scrum doesn't have a project manager role.

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

#78

Post by koonsolo »

spamizbad wrote: post #55

Yeah it does suck and you’re not wrong. I’ve spent the last 3 years at my company trying to refine our Agile/Scrum process into something that gets out of my engineers way. It basically boils down to the Engineering manager, product manager and project manager or “scrum master” actually putting in a good bit of work to make things run smoothly. 1) keep your stands below 15 minutes. Always. There should also never be…

> Engineering manager, product manager and project manager

What kind of Agile are following that has these roles defined?

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

#79

Post by koonsolo »

I feel the need to respond here, but I really don't want to. Anyway...

The core of Agile is that it values:

- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

- Working software over comprehensive documentation

- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

- Responding to change over following a plan

Agile also has 12 development principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.

3. Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months).

4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers.

5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted.

6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location).

7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.

9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.

10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.

11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly.

So now please check if your company is doing this or not.

If you say "We're following most of that, and it really sucks", then we can have a valuable discussion.

But if you say "We're not following that and it really sucks", well then why are you arguing that Agile doesn't work?

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

#80

Post by joaogfarias »

It sounds like someone who only had bad relationships and then proceeds to say that all men/women are trash and go M/WGTWO. The world is very big and each one of us can only experience first-hand a tiny part of it.

As other suggested, to understand the roots of Agile, I suggested looking at the Manifesto itself. Additionally, I suggest looking what people like Bob Martin, Martin Fowley, Allen Houb, Kent Beck, and Dave Farley are saying.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxXmTnb3mFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JihsBOBbdI

For reports on teams' performance, I suggest looking at the DORA's report. There thousand of teams have shown they experience in the last ten years. Additionally, if you want to some academic researches, going to Google Scholar and searching for "Systematic Review PUT_HERE_ONE_AGILE_PRACTICE" generally yields good results.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095058490... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5654783/

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