False. Hey, early and frequent releases, cicd, unit testing, small teams with courage and responsibility, all of those come out of agile. Yes, it come with a lot of hot air, and yes, not every project should be agile, but show some respect man.
The age of agile must end
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Re: The age of agile must end
#22I hate "agile". Would love to try agile some day. Never worked anywhere that actually did agile though - lots of places with bits and pieces. So many scrum masters, standup meetings, T-shirt sizing, kanban boards... but never full agile. Starting to think it's a myth.
It's not a myth, but I don't think there's any easy way to tell whether you'll be working with someone who actually knows it within the interview cycle. I got my first real taste of both TDD and Agile from a tiny startup, and it was the fastest and most impactful learning period of my career.
Re: The age of agile must end
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 80% of your design is invalidated halfway through the first Sprint, perhaps you are not developing software but rather you are chasing some dynamic business logic (or chasing trends), disguised as software. The fact that stints are being referred to as sprints, is also indicative of something being out of balance. By definition not everything can be a sprint, just like not everything can have the highest priority.…
A word can have more than one definition.
Sure, and language evolves. It is still misleading and or confusing, and I bet is by design.
Re: The age of agile must end
#24Who is this guy, and what kind of credentials does he have to sprout such drivel? It seems that like whatever sector he’s in, he has a big beef with developers. If he’s a designer like I assume from the fact it’s published in something related to UX, I suppose he wants a few months to design a whole application up front (because it’s fun!), only to then throw away 80% of it because the requirements changed halfway th…
Designers should have enough time up front to interview users, define the product and services, build a business plan, and design the application; just as architects need enough time to plan the project, analyze risk, and determine the systems design; IT needs enough time to figure out the server and network plan; and operations needs enough time to forecast staffing and define processes. This means weeks, and sometimes months, of calendar time ahead of encumbering the full dev team (and you better not roll all your devs into sprint zero in a big bang for the same reason), but it doesn't mean doing a full waterfall, either. It's just that if you have a must-deliver project, you need to have an atlas ready to go, even though the turn-by-turn directions will emerge through the project.
Even when designers go into refined visual design mode, the solutions plan should have them running at least one, ideally two sprints ahead of development to prevent starvation. My suspicion is that he's been a victim of the "let's throw everyone into the same timebox" scenario that projects default to in the absence of real solutioning and project governance. When "agile" is used as an excuse for a lack of planning, everyone suffers.
Re: The age of agile must end
#25I hate "agile". Would love to try agile some day. Never worked anywhere that actually did agile though - lots of places with bits and pieces. So many scrum masters, standup meetings, T-shirt sizing, kanban boards... but never full agile. Starting to think it's a myth.
It is not a myth but it is quite rare. Either you have incompetent management, or incompetent development, or both, which will make it impossible. Agile only works with trust, trust that every level of the organisation is experienced, focused and aligned. Most organisations end up bastardising it because that's not the case.
Trust is absolutely core to an agile workplace. If everyone's busy covering their own ass nothing impactful really gets done, and "feedback" is just everybody saying nothing because they don't dare disagree.
Re: The age of agile must end
#26Coming from big corp, I definitely miss my days at smaller shops that did Agile. I feel like so much of this has little to do with the development methodology and more to do with the people though. Smart people can make any methodology. Even at big corp, more waterfall-y processes are not terrible because I think my coworkers make it alright. The author seems to be unhappy about empowered developers being problematic…
Yep. Problem developers can create larger problems with longer feedback cycles.
Re: The age of agile must end
#27Who is this guy, and what kind of credentials does he have to sprout such drivel? It seems that like whatever sector he’s in, he has a big beef with developers. If he’s a designer like I assume from the fact it’s published in something related to UX, I suppose he wants a few months to design a whole application up front (because it’s fun!), only to then throw away 80% of it because the requirements changed halfway th…
Somehow an author with an MBA background fails to interrogate the business impact of their advice and various interpretations of agile.
I’m also slightly incredulous that they got through an MBA program without the reading comprehension needed to tackle the agile manifesto…
I think this is actually a blogspam article meant to drive outrage. Shame on HN for falling for it.
Re: The age of agile must end
#28Agile = the team who’s working to solve the problem should work together to figure out the best process for solving it.
That’s really all that there is to it. The point of it is that the process shouldn’t be handed from the top down and those folks who are in the trenches should be the ones who are choosing, evaluating and improving the process.
Stuff changes a lot in software, so the team needs to be able to adapt and change with it.
Re: The age of agile must end
#29You know, I'm definitely skeptical of the Agile Industrial Complex, but man, this article is doing us skeptics no favors. This is not a Software Person.
Re: The age of agile must end
#30I share the current disdain for "agile" workflows. In particular, I have grown very weary of every example of failure getting met with "they did agile wrong." After enough encounters with it being done in a way that does not bode well, I am forced to start questioning the general ideas. However, I do find the excessive snark against wanting to empower the developers kind of off putting. In particular, zero charity in…
The problem with this is that agile when done well is actually the best way to build software. Just because people misuse it (the name OR the method) doesn't actually make it bad.
And whatever you try to replace it with, you can expect middle management to do that wrong as well.