Agile is a Sham

Spoken like a true cowboy programmer who can't collaborate his way out of a wet paper bag and blames process when a team he's part of fails because of that...

This blog post offends me a little bit. The post screams hey, I am a cowboy programmer, and it almost implies that if you employ processes then you are stupid.

In this day and age, I would have thought finding the right tool for the right job is common sense. Apparently not.

Agile, among many other things, is not a silver bullet - it never was and it never will be. The key thing is to experiment and find what works for you, your team and your company. Most software projects are done in a team environment - putting a bunch of talented developers and designers together actually isn’t as simple as many seem to think. One example is right out of that original blog post:

> Given that I am not a fan of prescribed process as the solution to our problems, you can infer my opinion of the general quality and effectiveness of those programmers who teach these courses.

From that attitude, I can already see that he is an interesting developer to manage.

A team needs to function efficiently as a team. Having one or two ace developers aren’t going to help a lot if they can’t get along with the others.

Not to mention that people have spent time and effort proving that techniques such as TDD work for certain projects [1].

As many things in life, there are always people who try to take advantage of others. No doubt there are questionable ‘agile consultants’ who try to make a fortune out of uninformed clients. Just because some people aren’t using agile effectively or even correctly, doesn’t mean agile itself is a sham. Developers constantly make mistakes and write shitty code - should we say all the programming languages out there are a sham?

Keep an open mind is important, and a lot of times even necessary. To dismiss agile all together is in my opinion childish, and offensive to others who try to improve things and create more value.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/nagappan-1...

Originally posted at http://fredwu.me/post/20058808238/agile-is-not-a-sham

True, the article is basically a rant, but I tend to agree. I've felt like the agile train left my station long ago and it wasn't for trying. After being invited to attend a free 'workshop' from one of the holiest purveyors of agile out there, I left with the feeling that it definitely was all for those who did not know how to actually 'do the work'.

The trends I've been seeing and trying to do are as follows:

* full stack responsibility. You own the task front (js/html) to back (db), including testing.

* no f-ing standups. Communicate normally with your colleagues, no prescribed check in with them.

* no iterations. Release whenever; it may sound crazy but kanban style release whenever you're ready to push features out, in my mind, is the way to go.

* engineers, again, run the company. This in my mind is the biggest thing - having those 'with power' also be engineers and the product being the most important product.

All the above are the opposite of what I've seen with the agile movement. Keep teams small, keep them close and your product will reflect that.

Another huge, HUGE thing is to get the fucking mba management types out of the office. Can't stress this enough: if you can't code, you don't belong. You're making a tech company but you don't understand the basics of how the product is made.. So, you own a furniture making company and you don't understand what glue, oak, and lathes are..? Fail.

That's my real life experience and opinions regarding agile. I've tossed away all the agile stuff for a new project I'm doing and like the poster says, it's all based on common sense. You can run your company or project any way you want. I have friends that have millions in revenue every year with their small shops and they don't do any agile stuff. Yet they're one of the leaders in their space and when my friend, the engineer ceo, told me "we have no iterations or deadlines except when it has to be done by", that was a big wakeup. I was thinking "THAT'S how I want to do things".

So, it can be done. Good luck. :)

That's even more nebulous. Yes, those things are perfectly measurable, but how do you translate x number of new users per week into code?

Isn't that what software development is all about. It's about collapsing this cloud of uncertainty into concrete deterministic expression a.k.a code, which only solves the problem as you understand it.

If software development were that measurable, software developers would be as well paid as CEOs or sales people. But we are not. Because there is no way to demonstrate almost any relationship between what we do on daily basis (stare at screen and type on the keyboard as management often sees it) and sales and revenue. Some places go as far as to think of their development organization as overhead, a cost center.

> how do you translate x number of new users per week into code

You talked about turning code into metrics, now you want to turn metrics into code?

It's the other way around. Scrum translates delivered code into metrics. You track history. You would say "last week we delivered 4 new features and signed up x new users. That's above our average." It's not entirely nebulous.