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Agile is a Sham

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Re: Agile is a Sham

#11

Post by guynamedloren »

See, the thing is, the success of the coding-part of a project is dependent on the calibre of the engineers doing that coding and not the process they follow.

The success of the non-coding part of a project is dependent on the calibre of your sales/management and how they interact with the customer. If you are trying to prescribe some rigid process, however lean, in order to make that interaction effective, then you have a customer interface problem and process isn’t going to help it.

Couldn't agree more. The only thing I'd like to add is that there also must be a solid interface between sales/management and engineers.

Thanks for this.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#12

Post by plinkplonk »

I personally think Agile is mostly a scam built around some very small nuggets of common sense wisdom, which has then been propagandized by legions of clueless methodology consultants to mediocre teams and management, and spun into mediocre books and conferenceware. Just my personal opinion, ymmv etc.

That said, this is a badly written article which doesn't convey much useful information or convincing argument. I am surprised it is on the HN front page,leave alone being the top ranked article (at the time of writing this comment).

Agile and TDD have been exhaustively discussed before on HN and an HNSearch will bring up much better arguments, both pro and con, from people who can clearly explain their viewpoints.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#13

Post by rbanffy »

creigh wrote: post #10

Let me say this. I have found scrum in particular to be used as a management tool (report back tool), and not a developer tool. It doesn't matter where i go. It starts with the greatest of intentions, and ends up where management are sticking there fingers in the pie half way through. And by that I mean they don't use priorities on the backlog to manage the process. They use the standup meetings as a moan session whe…

Agile is a management tool. It helps manage developer time, feature bloat, organizational blocks, communication overheads and user expectations. It also helps you measure performance and identify bottlenecks in your own process. Like other comment said, it helps getting a couple things done instead of having a huge pile of stuff half done.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#14

Post by tbsdy »

creigh wrote: post #10

Let me say this. I have found scrum in particular to be used as a management tool (report back tool), and not a developer tool. It doesn't matter where i go. It starts with the greatest of intentions, and ends up where management are sticking there fingers in the pie half way through. And by that I mean they don't use priorities on the backlog to manage the process. They use the standup meetings as a moan session whe…

I disagree. I've met a LOT of developers who believe they know more than the customer, the QA team, the UX team and the DBAs. And they are, most often, wrong.

I think it takes a special sort of programmer to run a project to be honest. They are out there, but they are hard to find!

Re: Agile is a Sham

#15

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

guynamedloren wrote: post #11

See, the thing is, the success of the coding-part of a project is dependent on the calibre of the engineers doing that coding and not the process they follow. The success of the non-coding part of a project is dependent on the calibre of your sales/management and how they interact with the customer. If you are trying to prescribe some rigid process, however lean, in order to make that interaction effective, then you…

I anticipate a kicking for this but, hey ho.

IMHO if you have great people (developers, sales, test, whatever), process is near irrelevant. Sadly if we're being honest most people are not great (even when they think they are).

Where that's the case, process is the sticking plaster that attempts to make up for the failings of us mere mortals. Generally speaking process takes away some freedom from those involved and adds some overhead but provides some predictability.

Bad people don't make good use of freedom (and indeed often abuse it) and the project benefits from them being made more predictable. Good people not only make good use of freedom but are already largely predictable (they manage expectations, communicate well and so on) so not only do you add overhead and lose opportunity, but you gain almost nothing.

The issue is understanding how good your team are and what level of process is appropriate.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#16

Post by mseebach »

It's useful to distinguish big-A and small-A agile.

Big-A Agile is a management buzzword, something you can become certified in and certainly a scam.

Small-a agile is a number of mostly common sense principles on how to approach process. It is emphatically not the process itself. While it cannot be meaningfully certified, it can be taught and learned.

Someone else linked to the agile manifesto. I'm just gonna go out on a limb and paste the punchline:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Re: Agile is a Sham

#17

Post by ryandvm »

plinkplonk wrote: post #12

I personally think Agile is mostly a scam built around some very small nuggets of common sense wisdom, which has then been propagandized by legions of clueless methodology consultants to mediocre teams and management, and spun into mediocre books and conferenceware. Just my personal opinion, ymmv etc. That said, this is a badly written article which doesn't convey much useful information or convincing argument. I am…

The ranking on HN can be explained because there are apparently a lot of people here that share your sentiment.

I don't really have a problem with the tenets of Agile, but the Church of Agile, its high priests, and its associated industries are bullshit.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#18

Post by hpaavola »

The problem with these "only good programmers will create good products so stop with the Scrum already" rants is that in real life we have more than enough mediocre engineers and we just have to come up with best possible products with those.

I work as a quality assurance consultant. Usually companies buy my services when everything is messed up. Now if I try to solve their problems by saying "hire better engineers", nothing gets fixed. Nothing gets fixed because there is only so many good engineers available and the company usually don't have enough money to hire him/her.

But if I teach them to follow Scrum, it is really easy to add code reviews, testing (unit and functional), planned releases, etc.

It could be argued that one does not need Scrum to get those done or that it does not matter since team of better engineers will at some point do better job. But have problems in our hands right now and those must be fixed yesterday. So until some other methodology than Scrum get popular enough, we'll use that.

So in real life Scrum makes getting the best out of normal team so much easier. Sure there are always rockstars who don't need any process, but in reality you, me and most of us, are all pretty dumb and just have to live with the fact.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#19

Post by MrKurtHaeusler »

mseebach wrote: post #16

It's useful to distinguish big-A and small-A agile. Big-A Agile is a management buzzword, something you can become certified in and certainly a scam. Small-a agile is a number of mostly common sense principles on how to approach process. It is emphatically not the process itself. While it cannot be meaningfully certified, it can be taught and learned. Someone else linked to the agile manifesto. I'm just gonna go out…

I haven't heard that argument before. Interesting.

For me, big-A Agile refers to the Agile Manifesto for Software Development, and is the Agile that people are talking about in posts like this. It may be a software development buzzword, and yes there are certifications and they are scams, but I find the values and principles in the Agile Manifesto to be fairly sound and relevant within the context they were first produced in, as basically a reaction to waterfall in larger companies developing business software with average developers.

Small a agile is an English word meaning quick or flexible or something.

I am not saying I am right and you are wrong, just that is how I have usually thought about it.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#20

Post by sambeau »

Agile and Scrum have some good things going for them.

They teach developers that building things is always an iterative process. A well designed product will still require incremental on-the-fly improvements to get it right just as code does. Sometimes a design will require a refactor just as code does. Needing a 'complete' design doc before building a product is a fallacy.

They teach project managers that if they just let the designers and developers get on with it they can usually self-organise and manage their time better than if done top-down by a non-technical outsider.

They teach producers and 'product owners' that constant interference can be detrimental to a production process. Developers should be allowed to develop.

Best of all if done right they allow everyone scope to make mistakes yet still fix them and good mistakes that they can try out and keep.

However, there are downsides: scrum has no role for designers in the day-to-day production. Either they are pushed to the role of product manager or they have to work independently a sprint ahead. An ideal system would put the designers into the heart of the scrum team.

Top-down scrum is where it all goes badly wrong: producers and managers insisting that designs are complete before a line of code is created, managers taking the role of scrum-master, sprints being nothing more than waterfall milestones etc.

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