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The age of agile must end

uxdesign.cc

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: The age of agile must end

#31
It's agile forever and ever man. We are totally path dependent on this. It seems impossible to have any other idea of what we might do that might take off.

Agile is ironically one of the best indicators of fixedness on the planet. It was a simple idea that has taken root, & will never ever ever be removed.

Re: The age of agile must end

#32
I've worked in one (1) effective agile team in my entire career, and that one had an end user fully integrated into the team, providing near-realtime feedback and prioritizing bugs and feature development.

But this would leave the product manager out of a job, so I've never seen any other company even try it.

Re: The age of agile must end

#33
post #27
post #5

Who 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.

I’m not. When you meet a good manager with an MBA, chances are they’d have been (or were) a good manager without one, too. But in my experience, no bad manager has ever improved by getting an MBA. All they get is an indication they’re upper class enough to get into a program and possibly to take time off of work to do it.

Re: The age of agile must end

#35
post #2

I 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.

Eh, at best agile done well is the best way _we know of now_ to build _some kinds of_ software. I certainly don’t think it’s the best for mission critical software (e.g. someone dies if there’s a bug in this). And even for lower stakes things I’d find it incredibly hard to believe that we’ll never find anything better.

Re: The age of agile must end

#36
I'm not a particular fan of agile but the article goes a bit far and appears to be a critique of a poorly implemented agile methodology with inadequate resources.

Having a smooth and well organised release cadence is a good idea. Obviously skipping strategy and UI work is a bad idea. These tasks need to be done in parallel and inform each well thought-out sprint.

Re: The age of agile must end

#37
post #2

I 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…

“They did agile wrong” always, when I hear it, makes me chuckle as if someone said “russia did communism wrong, it wasn’t the real…”

Agile is middle / project managers doing cultish makework for themselves, to codependent-ly distract from feelings of life-cycle imposter syndrome.

Re: The age of agile must end

#38
post #4

Coming 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.

The main difference between Some-planning-up-front and big-A Agile IMHO is that responsibility for failure of delivering on the plan can be shunted away from the leadership to a slow-burn failure of delivering on quality after many iterations. A product will have been built, but it is too costly, low quality, expensive to maintain. Lack of qualified software design can be papered over for several years with the big A...

Re: The age of agile must end

#39
post #21

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 hot air came later when the project manager gods realised they had to rebrand if they were going to continue telling coders what to do.
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