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Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

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Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#81

Post by berntb »

Silhouette wrote: post #80
berntb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>no-one else did either? The GP wrote: "wide use", not that agile work methods was totally unknown. The GP claims are similar to my memories but sure, I might have been in the wrong places and read the wrong sources. Do you have references for your position?

> Do you have references for your position? I didn't have anything specific in mind; I'm going by my own experience, discussions with past colleagues, and conferences over the years more than anything. That said, it's not hard to turn up examples with a few minutes looking through my bookshelf and Google Scholar. For automated testing, just stick search terms like "automated software testing" into Scholar and set the…

Thanks. Automated testing, yes. But e.g. TDD?

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#82

Post by tiedemann »

I once worked in a very nice team. We used Scrum. We delivered before deadline and the bugs were few. The scrum master was a developer gone PM but with total understanding of which problems you come across as a software developer.

The project would probably have been ok without agile since most of the team was good at their job but I felt it made the process more inspiring and fun. It makes me sad that a lot of people seem to just dismiss it because of bad practices.

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#83

Post by Silhouette »

berntb wrote: post #81
Silhouette wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have references for your position? I didn't have anything specific in mind; I'm going by my own experience, discussions with past colleagues, and conferences over the years more than anything. That said, it's not hard to turn up examples with a few minutes looking through my bookshelf and Google Scholar. For automated testing, just stick search terms like "automated software testing" into Scholar and set the…

Thanks. Automated testing, yes. But e.g. TDD?

I'm not claiming TDD as something widespread before Agile. I'm claiming TDD as something unproven that the Agile consultants started mixing in later. (Please see the list in my second post to this thread.)

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#84

Post by DanielBMarkham »

rsanheim wrote: post #76
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5

Oh boy, could I give a good rant about how we're seriously screwing up Agile. In fact, I did -- http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/agile-ruined-... But as bad as the average Agile adoption is, I disagree with the author. Let's take each of his points: Companies are “doing agile” Yes. As an example, last year I had a huge manufacturing company (which I will not name) ask me to come in to help as an Agile c…

Agile is not best practices. http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/27 Sorry, just one of my pet peeves, and describing agile as == best practice doesn't help anyone.

Nice rant!

Sorry, but I'm not going to use "each person's generic current favorite practice" instead of "best practices", even though that's exactly what I mean. It may be more correct, but it just doesn't sound right to me. You are correct that the term is overused and doesn't provide a lot of descriptive power. Part of the problem is that when I say "Agile is best practices around iterative and incremental development" what I'm _trying_ to say is exactly that: it's fuzzy and difficult to get your head around and understand if you're new to the field. it varies greatly depending not only on the person you ask, but the particular circumstances. Everybody has a different set of favorites. So the things you rant about actually are good things for purposes of my description. The frustration you describe is exactly what newcomers find. I am not saying that there is a best way to do things which I will simply not describe. I am saying that a dozen people will have a dozen best ways, each of which may change drastically depending on the particular situation. I must describe this situation, and the phrase I used appears to me to be the best for doing that.

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#85

Post by api »

BadassFractal wrote: post #39
api wrote: post #37

Agile is just another in a long line of fads that try to use management "methodologies" to make programming a commodity that can be done by line-workers. It's not, and it can't be made so. Programming is a highly skilled craft. Good code is written by good programmers. Bad code is written by bad programmers. Bad management can hobble good programmers, but no form of management can make bad programmers write good code…

I feel you got it backwards. The whole idea behind agile is to treat programming as a craft and to focus on the people, as opposed to treating development as a production line. Some good readings on the subject: Extreme Programming Explained, Agile Software Development Ecosystems, Balancing Agility and Discipline.

Every capital-A Agile deployment I've ever seen uses Scrum to try to run programmers like line cooks.

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#86

Post by dbcfd »

wpietri wrote: post #58
dbcfd wrote: post #3

The devil is in the details. You still need competent people to determine and estimate tasks, and to implement those tasks. Implementation is the biggie. How do you design the implementation? How complete are your tests? What are the important requirements of the task? There seems to continue to be this idea in management that process will take the place of skilled programmers. That you can then just plug any program…

There seems to continue to be this idea in management that process will take the place of skilled programmers. This is true, but it's not what Agile originators meant. The early Agile stuff was exactly the opposite. E.g. the initial SCRUM paper starts out talking about "Small teams of competent individuals, working within a constrained space that they own and control." Extreme Programming specifically removed from ma…

But if the programmers are running the show, what is management supposed to do? That's why there's a scrum master. Yes, you need a leader, but often that role gets pushed to a manager, who focuses too much on process. They should rename it the scrum playmaker, with each sprint focusing on a new playmaker, returning control to the team.

Managers also have a much different understanding of the word "competent" than the people on the team.

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#87

Post by wpietri »

Silhouette wrote: post #73
wpietri wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're again wrong on the history of the Agile movement, and I'm disappointed that you entirely ignore the meat of the point that you're replying to. As to your assertion that everything good was in wide use before: that's not how I recall it. For example, CI: the Joel Test, written in 2000, suggests that the vast bulk of shops couldn't even manage to do a daily build, and he didn't even mention CI as an option. Also…

There are millions of programmers in the world, and plenty of us have been doing it professionally since before Agile was all the rage. It sounds like you have too, but are you really arguing that just because you personally didn't encounter these ideas before Agile advocacy came along, no-one else did either? Or perpetuating the false dichotomy between Agile and Waterfall? I have never worked on a project that follo…

I have never argued that "no-one" encountered those ideas, and your repeated exaggeration of my position is frustrating.

Nobody in the Agile movement claimed novelty for individual pieces. What was different was the way the pieces went together, and the shift in values and cultural norms that they required. That wasn't purely novel either; the fact that several people invented similar processes at the same time suggests that, as with most inventions, change was in the air. But what the Agile people undeniably did was to define and promote that difference in a way that gave people something to rally around. At the time, waterfall and a waterfall-ish RUP were the big processes people were discussing, and the notion that one would focus on people over process, or working code over documentation was heretical.

Also, I'm having a hard time taking your approach to evidence seriously. Rapid Development was a major survey of current software project management and a catalog of best practices put out by a large tech publisher. Splosky was also writing clearly about current practices. Your counter-evidence is the (unnamed) projects you've (anonymously) been on. Plus that one of them wrote a different book that you can pick nits on.

And honestly, I don't get why you're arguing the nits and ignoring my main points. You clearly have some big issue with your version of Agile and it's imagined history. But I honestly don't care what process you follow as long as it doesn't suck for you, so arguing it with me isn't really helping anybody.

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#88

Post by wpietri »

Silhouette wrote: post #74
wpietri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So are we trying to help teams of experts or the clueless and/or terminally lazy here? Me? I'm trying to help teams of smart, well-intentioned people. Which is why I'm happy to share what's worked for me and encourage people to try those things if they're interested. That's what motivates the early Agile people I know. But consultants are mostly in business to make money, and the bulk of their audience is clueless,…

At the risk of stating the obvious, has it occurred to you that the reason you have never seen a teams in large organisations adopt Agile successfully is that the basic philosophy of Agile doesn't scale to large projects ? You can get away with a lot of informality and doing things on-the-fly for small projects, when everyone involved can get around the same table in a meeting room and a single expert from the custom…

Why yes, that has occurred to me. It's possible. But I doubt it for reasons I explained above. The few successful Lean Manufacturing adoptees in the US are on the smaller side as well. That's not because it doesn't scale, as Toyota is now the world's largest car manufacturer. It's because small companies can make cultural changes more easily. See the This American Life episode on NUMMI for a poignant illustration of that.

I think the answer to this question in software will come from companies that have started small with something like XP and grown into large companies. I suspect you'll end up with something like the cellular model that bodies use to scale. That's how it seems to be going at the companies I've visited. One startup I know is at 50 or so engineers and they are doing fine with a lot of small teams working semi-independently, releasing daily, and coordinating as they see fit. Or take YouTube. They have a few hundred people but they maintain a weekly (or more often) release schedule, power works in a bottom-up fashion, product management is decentralized, and the teams are loosely joined. It works fine for them.

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#89

Post by Silhouette »

wpietri wrote: post #87
Silhouette wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are millions of programmers in the world, and plenty of us have been doing it professionally since before Agile was all the rage. It sounds like you have too, but are you really arguing that just because you personally didn't encounter these ideas before Agile advocacy came along, no-one else did either? Or perpetuating the false dichotomy between Agile and Waterfall? I have never worked on a project that follo…

I have never argued that "no-one" encountered those ideas, and your repeated exaggeration of my position is frustrating. Nobody in the Agile movement claimed novelty for individual pieces. What was different was the way the pieces went together, and the shift in values and cultural norms that they required. That wasn't purely novel either; the fact that several people invented similar processes at the same time sugge…

I'm sorry you're feeling frustrated with this discussion. I'm afraid I just don't understand what your "main points" are supposed to be, if you think I'm only picking nits with the details.

I started this subthread with some fairly black-and-white statements about the relative timing of good practices being adopted, Agile taking off, and less proven practices entering the picture:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3476171

Since then, you have accused me, repeatedly, of being wrong about the history of Agile. Is your objection that early versions of a few Agile processes already existed, albeit in relative obscurity, before the Manifesto was written, but I talked about how 'concrete examples of "Agile" processes started to appear' after the Manifesto was written?

If so, I'll happily concede that point. I don't think it really matters whether you define Agile as starting from the evolution of the general approach/abstract philosophy (which had evidently started by the time of those initial processes) or the writing of the concrete Manifesto and popularisation of the Agile moniker. Nor do I think it really matters whether you define processes like XP and Scrum as appearing as "Agile" processes when they were popularised and given that label (around the time the Manifesto also became widely known) or from when the original processes that became what we now call XP and Scrum were first used anywhere. Any way you cut it, we're talking about the same groups of people, the same general period of time, and the same end results.

My main point is simply that many of the good practices that were adopted by those early Agile processes and are often considered to fall under the Agile umbrella today did not actually originate during that period of time or with the people who worked on those early processes and the Manifesto. However, many of the Agile practices I consider unproven did originate during that period of time and with those people.

While you may wish that no-one in the Agile community claims otherwise, unfortunately that is not always true. While I was researching my post with sources, I found a comment on Martin Fowler's personal web site claiming that Kent Beck coined the term "refactoring" in the mid-'90s, for example, and numerous comments from various posters on other forums suggesting that Fowler's book was the definitive original reference. I think it is important to debunk such claims and any attempt to paint Agile and Waterfall as some sort of dichotomy. That just isn't how software development works, and being "Not Waterfall" is not an argument for switching to any given Agile process.

Re: Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining

#90

Post by wpietri »

Silhouette wrote: post #83
berntb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Automated testing, yes. But e.g. TDD?

I'm not claiming TDD as something widespread before Agile. I'm claiming TDD as something unproven that the Agile consultants started mixing in later. (Please see the list in my second post to this thread.)

For the third time: you are incorrect about the history. Test-first development was created by working programmers as part of Extreme Programming before the term "Agile" even existed.
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