31–40 of 189 posts
"thats SCRUM and TDD and all the rest; it is all those new ways of managing development projects" TDD is a style of developing and nothing to do with management. Anyone who has worked on something more than a trivial size app knows how useful having a decent set of automated unit tests are. Anyone who dismisses this as a "management scam" is fooling only themself.
"Software Engineering is an attempt of turning an art into science".
Let's be honest. Software development is an art form. Just like people form groups from quartets to orchestras to make music, so do people form groups of differing skillsets to develop software.
That doesn't mean an art is shooting from the hip. There is still tons of practice to be done, and the various skill levels of each individual determines the possibility for success.
The problem, then, is that there are not enough Bubles, Joshua Bells, Ashkenazys, etc. around to make all the software in the world. Most companies have to make do with large concentrations of amateurs led by the occasional Bieber/Gaga.
So what are all these processes then? They're essentially what companies wish to use to artificially increase their chances of success... However, manufacturing art leads to potential stagnation and also the possibility that every project that follows the same process have the same flaws (like how all pop music nowadays all sound the same).
Sadly, it'll take an extremely brave company to get artists to develop their software nowadays. Nowadays, the artists stick to developing their own products =)
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 pro…
The reason I make the distinction is that big-A is the quantifiable bit, but you can tick all the boxes and still essentially do waterfall. Conversely, you can be small-a agile without ticking the boxes - agile isn't, and can't be, prescriptive.
If the team feels they don't need daily stand-ups, or if they want to sit down (the horror!), there is nothing about being agile that should keep them from doing that. Same goes for tests: You can worship the test coverage number obsessively, but if your assertions are pointless or missing, you won't reap the benefits. Conversely, an agile team can decide to forego tests if that's the right thing.
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.
Anyone that says you can follow some process to ensure success is effectively telling you they have implemented artificial intelligence that simulates a production line designer and to be able to do it by using humans pushing bits of paper around as their computer.
[Obligatory plug and disclaimer: Agile professional who wrote an earlier rant "Agile Ruined my Life" http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/agile-ruined-... Also I am writing some practical how-to Agile e-books trying to undo some of the damage: http://tiny-giant-books.com/scrummaster.htm ] Just differentiate between what Agile is and how people are pushing Agile on you. Different things entirely. Agile is be…
Agree. Let's not forget the HR challenge most organizations have today. It's hard to find, hire, develop and keep talented people in the company. I heard the other day: "every job seeker is a potential low performer". The basis of that is that most talented, highly qualified people is either managing teams or freelancing/consulting, and inevitably making interesting amounts of cash either way. So the chances of finding this profile on every Agile team is low.
In this scenario, Agile has its intrinsic value of providing teams members of various competence levels with some minimum rules of conduct, processes and tools. Maybe good teams will think they are all about bureaucracy, or they'll think it's something the management layers of the company can look and understand, like a burnout chart.
That's why I cut the second sentence of the quote above in the middle. Sometimes, as a manager, you need a "way", like the Japanese word for "Do", to keep discipline and make things moving forward.
[Obligatory plug and disclaimer: Agile professional who wrote an earlier rant "Agile Ruined my Life" http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/agile-ruined-... Also I am writing some practical how-to Agile e-books trying to undo some of the damage: http://tiny-giant-books.com/scrummaster.htm ] Just differentiate between what Agile is and how people are pushing Agile on you. Different things entirely. Agile is be…
> In many shops, Agile is just another way of micro-managing teams, sadly. I think this is a big source of the complaints, yeah. If I had to narrow it to one specific mis-implementation of agile, it'd be having daily standup meetings turn into daily mini-performance-reviews with the boss. Iirc the Official Scrum Rules try to avoid that by decreeing that the scrum-master should be just another team member, and not a p…
...recounting verbally what one did the previous day...
...to marking one's progress on a whiteboard...
...to having to write down on an index card beforehand and turning it in to the IT director after the scrum meeting (in addition to the above).
With the boss (and sometimes, the CEO) in attendance, there was no chance of an honest verbal exchange about roadblocks etc.
Good metrics for measuring coding progress are so elusive, I can't imagine management NOT trying to mess with pure agile principles if tight deadlines and delivery dates are at stake.
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…
I can think of dozens of changes I should make to my every day life based on common sense (don't get stressed, spend more time with firends and familly, save for the future etc). Why don't I do them? Because it's difficult to align these "simlple" truths with the overall complexity of my environment and competing pressures. There's always complexity in the system, agile just simplifies one part and moves complexity into other areas e.g. having a highly trained and skilled team.
"Agile is not a silver bullet" is more to the point, and applying it dogmatically can counterproductive. But regular communication, short, well defined sprints and a prioritized backlog available to all can do wonders in terms of getting a small amount of stuff done rather than a large amount half done.
Discipline is just a tax. If you need to structure and test your code, then you're a mediocre coder at best, and so is your work and project. Just write whatever you feel like, it'll turn out ok. You're awesome, how could you possibly code anything less than exactly what the client wants?
Nonsense. Agile is a discipline, just like properly structuring your code and testing it. It's discipline at a macro scale, on the team, rather than the individual programmer. You might argue over whether its specific practices are better or worse than other methods, but arguing against any development process at all is absurd.