Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Agile is a Sham

williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 189 posts

Re: Agile is a Sham

#151

Post by Silhouette »

wpietri wrote: post #129
__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…

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 so…

> Bob Martin one of the craftsmanship people, is very sincere in his desire to make the field better.

Unfortunately, you can be totally sincere in your good intentions, and yet still repeatedly be wrong. When you are a high profile figure who presumes to advise others on the best ways to do their job, that makes you a liability.

It's a shame. Some of Bob Martin's earlier work exploring OO and the SOLID principles was quite decent stuff. But I think it's obvious at this point that he and several of his colleagues at Object Mentor have collectively lost the plot.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#152

Post by zmmmmm »

timbre wrote: post #105
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

[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…

> The second secret is that most teams, frankly, are not that good. It's so important to remember this, as well as the corollary: I'm not that good myself. The article included this line: > If you need to follow a prescribed process in order to be in any way an effective coder then you are mediocre at best and so is your work and your project. I'm not sure if I agree with the statement itself, although I certainly th…

I objected to the same statement but for slightly different reasons. It works when your project is of a size that can be done by a fairly small team that can communicate intimately and instantaneously at all times. We're talking 1 -5 people max. But what happens when there are 30 developers, 50 developers, or 100 developers. Without some overarching system of coordination these people will just be flailing around, constantly treading on each other, breaking each others stuff. Somehow you have to break it down and give people a way to understand what everyone else is doing, and that turns into "process". You can do it any way you like, but what ever you come up with is still going to be that evil word "process".

The problem is that said "process" then gets deployed in a cargo cult manner to any project regardless of size, divisibility, who is managing it working on it, etc.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#153

Post by smeg »

wpietri wrote: post #82
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

[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…

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…

I could not possibly agree more.

Like many early Agile adopters I have been shocked and saddened by what it has become. I think the problem is that brainfucked corporate IT programmers (Java, .NET, whatever) have jumped on the bandwagon and driven it into the sea.

I was recently smacked around the head by this in a meeting about how a team was going to implement Jira ticketing to help improve their development process. I am not sure entirely what I was expecting, but I was totally, totally unprepared for the mind-stunning crap that I got - an endless series of slides of things called "workflows" which apparently document the life-cycle of a ticket and need to be mapped out in excruciating gory detail. I decided to raise my hand and ask a simple question "how do I just raise a ticket and assign it to someone" - the presenter gave me this kind of stunned "why would you want to do that??" look and explained that it doesn't work that way, first you need to assign everyone into teams and roles (like tester, developer etc), and then the workflow will decide where the ticket goes based on the kind of ticket and it's status. Mind blown. I could almost appreciate how such system might be of use on a really large project where you don't know and interact with most project members directly - they had a team of 8 people including testers and analysts. And in their minds they were doing Agile.

In another case I was arguing for the use of the Jira Fisheye plugin to enable meaningful access to VC to enable things like code review and release diffs and the like. The so called "Agile practitioners" had a different idea however - they were keen on a different plugin called Greenhopper which apparently does Agile process management and the like. I knew something was wrong when it was mentioned that it does nice Gantt charts. I probed a little deeper into why they didn't see the value in Fisheye and found that their actual VC practices were a joke - ludicrously large commits with minimal comment just before a release, no consistent release tags, broken commit history (they seemed to be deleting and re-creating their trunk after every release...what I don't even...). Advanced process/project management techniques over getting the basics like VC right? That doesn't sound like Agile in any universe I am familiar with.

I really struggle to think of any other examples where a worthy movement has been so thoroughly corrupted and debased into something almost diametrically opposed to it's original vision. Fuck Agile programming and what it has become. I think I'll stick with being a Pragmatic programmer.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#154

Post by vannevar »

itsreallynotme wrote: post #148
vannevar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario isn't about the lying, I was just anticipating the argument that the standup wouldn't improve communication if someone wanted to subvert it. The basic situation---a teammate who isn't communicative---can only be 'fixed' by getting him to communicate. You might argue that I fire him and spend weeks looking for someone who codes as well, or alternatively hire a 'communication coach' to help him with his pe…

A 15-minute standup isn't going to hurt a good team's productivity, while it could greatly improve the productivity of a mediocre team. It takes a lot to noticeably hurt a good team's productivity. But it's mean, just fucking mean , to punish a good, productive, communicative team with more process because you also manage crappy teams.

[I]t's mean, just fucking mean, to punish a good, productive, communicative team...

I didn't say standups don't benefit good teams; quite the opposite. You've missed (or ignored) my point that even good communicators miss conveying important information sometimes. And if the team is really so naturally communicative, they're hardly going to view a standup as punishment. Again, I have to really wonder what kind of standups you've been subjected to that would trigger your revulsion. It's like being violently opposed to eating with a fork. Technically, no, you don't need one but it often helps. Either way, it's nothing to get worked up over.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#155

Post by artsrc »

vannevar wrote: post #147
itsreallynotme wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good enough" is certainly better than "not good enough". In the scenario that you described, someone went from not communicating at all to lying every day, and getting "caught" at the end of a sprint. Standups didn't fix anything there. Also, there is a world of difference between calling something good enough, and it being good enough. If I'm managing 5 job sites ... once a day sure beats nothing If, as a manager o…

The scenario isn't about the lying, I was just anticipating the argument that the standup wouldn't improve communication if someone wanted to subvert it. The basic situation---a teammate who isn't communicative---can only be 'fixed' by getting him to communicate. You might argue that I fire him and spend weeks looking for someone who codes as well, or alternatively hire a 'communication coach' to help him with his pe…

> A 15-minute standup isn't going to hurt a good team's productivity

It can send a powerful message that the team is not responsible for producing the software.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#156

Post by Drbble »

smeg wrote: post #153
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…

I could not possibly agree more. Like many early Agile adopters I have been shocked and saddened by what it has become. I think the problem is that brainfucked corporate IT programmers (Java, .NET, whatever) have jumped on the bandwagon and driven it into the sea. I was recently smacked around the head by this in a meeting about how a team was going to implement Jira ticketing to help improve their development proces…

You are saying that Agile is supposed to mean programming in Ruby instead of Java? And only small teams can be Agile? Amazon.com would disagree with you, for one.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#157

Post by Drbble »

wissler wrote: post #149
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…

Glad to see disdain for "agile" is finally becoming mainstream. Now, it may be that someone writing rote software should follow a process, but for anyone doing anything actually innovative, you can't get into their head and tell them what process they must follow, whether waterfall or agile. It's like telling Michelangelo the process for sculpting. Rather than teaching people processes, they should help foster better…

Mocking Agile strawman has been a pop pastime since Yegge wrote Good Agile Bad Agile years ago.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#158

Post by Drbble »

bunderbunder wrote: post #103
ionforce wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? It doesn't absolve the team of the fact that they're doing Agile incorrectly. Call them whatever you want, they're still Doing It Wrong.

Isn't it ironic that by simply capitalizing the word 'agile' you can change its meaning to describe something that's the very antithesis of agility? If a methodology is so brittle that any diversion from the straight and narrow (a) means you're no longer using that methodology and (b) ostensibly (or actually) invites disaster, then that is a very, very rigid methodology.

That's like saying Javascript is a very rigid language because your program breaks if you change braces to parenthesis.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#159

Post by Drbble »

qdog wrote: post #94
gnaffle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software that keeps all modern airliners in the sky is written by companies that have lots and lots of process. Do you think those software projects are doomed from the jump just because there's a lot of process involved?

The companies have a lot of process, but how do you know how the software was written? Usually I see things like a huge project that is failing while the initial prototype that works gets upgraded to production...which has often been produced by cowboys. However, I don't work in the airline industry. I do work somewhere where one errant line of code can destroy productivity around the entire globe, brick computers, a…

I don't know that Boeing follows your cowboy methodology. Hipmunk probably does. But Boeing puts the planes in the air.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#160

Post by Drbble »

jbooth wrote: post #127
brazzy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who demands 3 week tasks launch in 2 weeks? And Agile dev cycles delivers whatever is ready every two weeks, instead of shipping everything on an arbitrary deadline.
Post reply on HN