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Agile is a Sham

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Re: Agile is a Sham

#121

Post by brazzy »

itsnotme wrote: post #75
brazzy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I enjoy programming with other programmers. But I don't collaborate well with people who don't know a fucking thing about programming who try to put process on top of the process of programming. Cowboy is a complement. It doesn't mean "lone ranger" or "asshole", it means lazy, hard worker who takes the shortest path to greatest output. So, yup. Cowboy here.

Well, if you mean "Programming is a process" to include techniques of effective collaboration, then agile is part of programming.

Claiming that people who try to define methods to do that better "don't know a fucking thing about programming" is A) a non-sequitur and B) indicates that you don't collaborate well, period.

No, Cowboy is not a compliment. It means a hard worker who takes the shortest path to the greatest output of code that doesn't fulfill requirements and which nobody else can maintain.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#122

Post by davesims »

Must be Wednesday.

TODO next week: Go collect all of the blog post cycles of "Agile Sucks" -> "No, agile in theory is fine, it's just marketing and implementation that sucks."

It's a full-fledged meme at this point. And I think if you distilled all of these posts down to their essence, you'd have a really solid critique and we could build some lessons learned, and the next time someone gets burned by a bad implementation of s/Agile|XP|Scrum/ maybe the narrative will change a bit from "Agile sucks" to something more productive, something closer to "there's that Agile execution thing again, and here's what I did about it."

Everything OP says is true, Agile is misapplied, overmarketed and badly executed, and much suffering in the name of "Agile" has happened.

But we need to change the story now. This same cycle of "sucks" -> "yeah but" is generating more heat than light. Time to reset and redirect our expectations to something productive.

"In time there will be a new movement which paints Agile as broken, inefficient and bad and we’ll get a new brand. That’s the kind of iterative development I’m looking forward to; a new target for our collective disdain ;)"

Here we've hit on something. On common refrain in anti-Agile screeds is "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." And it's true, but instead of cynically setting us up for some other jaded iteration of Good Process Idea -> Marketing Scam/Bad Implementation -> Backlash, let's distill the lessons learned into something a little more focused and circumspect.

Let's not cycle through this again, please. Let's set Agile in its proper place, good stuff, bad stuff, the whole thing. And let's tell the right story that might help us stop looking to things like Agile as the One Best Way to do software and see it as the limited tool it is, dependent on many other concerns, such as quality of developer, product focus, political environment, etc. Agile was a great insight in its time, and I think the time is come for a large-scale retrospective by the community to state the lessons learned.

One iteration I would really like to see end is "Agile Sucks" -> "But Not Really". Time to move on to the next level, one that acknowledges Agile's failings but doesn't involve a wholesale scrapping of Agile's important insights.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#123

Post by itsreallynotme »

vannevar wrote: post #116
itsreallynotme wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's algorighm thinks I'm a spammer and wouldn't let me reply, but really, itsnotme. I could collaborate well with that person. If I like the product and the people enough I'll work on a team that uses "Agile". But I do it knowing that process is not communication, and that standups are a fucking joke.

No but communication is part of any effective process. Standup is just having everyone say what they accomplished yesterday and what they're planning on doing today. If you're on a team with more than three or four people, it's a useful way to get a quick summary of where everyone's at. Some people are good at letting other people know when they're stuck, but some aren't, and if you've got the latter on your team sta…

No amount of process can fix bad communication. Standups are an attempt at that. Teams that have good communication succeed more, and standups aren't integral to their success. Teams with bad communication fail more, and standups can't help them.

Sales teams and sports teams don't work as a comparison, they aren't building something (sales is a particularly bad example, most sales team members are in direct competition with each other). I'm trying to imagine standups on a building site.

Tom: "Yesterday I.."

Everyone cuts Tom off and talks over each other: "No shit, Tom. You're gonna work today, too." "That insulation isn't going to unroll itself!" "Tell us, dear Tom, will you be screwing the sheetrock in with a DeWalt or a Hitachi?"

Good teams communicate while they build, and know where each other are.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#124

Post by davesims »

cletus wrote: post #66

I'm surprised no one has brought up Steve Yegge's Good Agile, Bad Agile [1], which speaks well to both Google culture and scaling (good) Agile. One of the comments on that post mentions it. It's worth reading (and being Yegge, that'll take awhile). Agile is like anything else: some well-meaning (and arguably useful) principles that get warped by bad managers and bad companies. The natural evolution for any such idea…

Exactly. And note the date: 6 years ago. I think the collective wisdom has been acquired. The IT community needs to name it in a way that makes these lessons learned common enough that the next time someone is burned by Bad Agile, they won't rewrite one more iteration of this same post.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#125

Post by __abc »

viggity wrote: post #106
__abc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people that screwed it up are the ones that monetized it. They made it a) rigid based on their definition b) defined themselves as experts in making teams agile based on their rigid definition c) charged for it PS. These same guys, once they couldn't squeeze anymore blood out of the Agile stone, moved onto a new marketing term, "craftsmanship". They now charge the same clients, even more money, to teach them…

I disagree that craftsmanship is a replacement for agile. To me, being a software craftsman is more about how you write and structure code. Agile is about figuring out what the end product should be and how you get there.

I don't mean to imply they are the same.

I'm reflecting on how the same "agile experts that sell/sold their services" quickly abandoned selling that and moved onto selling "craftsmanship" once their Agile well dried up.

cough Bob Martin cough cough Object Mentor cough

Re: Agile is a Sham

#126

Post by itsreallynotme »

brazzy wrote: post #121
itsnotme wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy programming with other programmers. But I don't collaborate well with people who don't know a fucking thing about programming who try to put process on top of the process of programming. Cowboy is a complement. It doesn't mean "lone ranger" or "asshole", it means lazy, hard worker who takes the shortest path to greatest output. So, yup. Cowboy here.

Well, if you mean "Programming is a process" to include techniques of effective collaboration, then agile is part of programming. Claiming that people who try to define methods to do that better "don't know a fucking thing about programming" is A) a non-sequitur and B) indicates that you don't collaborate well, period. No, Cowboy is not a compliment. It means a hard worker who takes the shortest path to the greatest…

You say "techniques of effective collaboration", I say "talking to people". If you need guidelines for that, that's cool.

The thing that suggests to me that you and I wouldn't work well together is that you make broad value judgements based on twisted interpretation and extrapolation of these comment threads.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#127

Post by jbooth »

brazzy wrote: post #117
jbooth wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that term cowboy programmer. Very effective rhetoric, though. Let's take the archetypical example of people who get stuff done without our process, and call them cowboys! Now, anytime someone points out a dumbass process-driven decision that could have been avoided by using our brains, we can just disparage them as a cowboy. Note, we're using small-a agile at my shop and it's working well, but that's because o…

It's ridiculously easy to get stuff done without any process when you work on your own and the projects are small enough for that. You don't even need to be very good to succeed in such a scenario. Cowboy programmers are those who extrapolate from that and believe that teams efforts can work the same way, and who think that process causes only inefficiencies rather than preventing much larger ones. But for a team to…

Yeah man, I get that. I said that I'm at a small-a agile shop and it's working well for us.

That doesn't change the fact that the only time I've seen the phrase 'cowboy programmer' used, it's as a preemptively ad hominem argument that anything besides Capital A Agile As Written On Stone Tablets can't possibly work. And if it does, it's cause they're cowboys.

As a counterpoint, demanding something is deployed every 2 weeks, whether it's a 1-week task or a 3-week task, leads to plenty of cowboyism right within the process.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#128

Post by BobertK »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #118
wpietri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And this shit makes me furious. I got involved with this stuff before the term "Agile" existed. At the beginning, it was a bunch of professionals (mostly developers) sincerely trying to find better ways of working. Extreme Programming, for example, came to be because the developers were really interested to experiment with how their team got stuff done. It breaks my heart that in the ensuing decade it has tu…

Would you have the same opinion about the PMI and the ecosystem built to support PMP certifications?

More so, even.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#129

Post by wpietri »

__abc wrote: post #95
wpietri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And this shit makes me furious. I got involved with this stuff before the term "Agile" existed. At the beginning, it was a bunch of professionals (mostly developers) sincerely trying to find better ways of working. Extreme Programming, for example, came to be because the developers were really interested to experiment with how their team got stuff done. It breaks my heart that in the ensuing decade it has tu…

The only people that screwed it up are the ones that monetized it. They made it a) rigid based on their definition b) defined themselves as experts in making teams agile based on their rigid definition c) charged for it PS. These same guys, once they couldn't squeeze anymore blood out of the Agile stone, moved onto a new marketing term, "craftsmanship". They now charge the same clients, even more money, to teach them…

Depends on who you're talking about here. Bob Martin one of the craftsmanship people, is very sincere in his desire to make the field better. I'm not sure about who's cropped up lately, though.

Also, it's very, very rare for somebody to make a mint on a software book. I've talked with a number of authors, and their universal view is that writing code pays much better than writing a book. You do it because you have something to say, not because you want to get rich.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#130

Post by huherto »

I try to emphasize the agile principles. I think there is a lot of wisdom there. The most important: "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility"
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