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Saying goodbye to Agile

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#91

Post by Balinares »

dijit wrote: post #13

There's an interesting phenomenon that Agile (capital A) has exposed me to, and once I saw it due to Agile I've seen parallels elsewhere. In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough . The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty. It's also true for Cloud providers; that they're not suited for certain…

I mean, Switzerland and North Korea both call themselves democracies but the specifics matter. The specifics matter!

These discussions are always fascinating in a sort of baffling way to me because I've only had great experiences with what I call agile. Like, you bring it into the team and within months everyone is gushing about how much better life is now. Yet threads like this one are full of people reporting awful experiences.

Apparently whatever it is they're doing involves a lot of meetings and little actual flexibility? The deeply unexpected thing about that, to me, is, if they hate some parts of the process, why are they keeping them? Every team and every business is different and you have to iterate to arrive at whatever will work best for you. That's possibly the one most important point, IMO. Dropping the things that don't work is a key part of that!

Eric Brechner of Microsoft (of all possible places...) gives a great talk on his team's approach, and I've had good experiences using it as a starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD0y-aU1sXo

But again, every team is different. Even the greatest possible theoretical approach is only a starting point.

And like with Switzerland vs North Korea, I guess the key thing is how much ownership of the process those subjected to it have?

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#92

Post by beAbU »

locknitpicker wrote: post #72
Aurornis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite Agile-ism is when Agile is defined as “the process that works for the team”. If a team adopts agile (in any variation) and doesn’t like it, the Agile defenders will appear and argue that the team wasn’t actually doing agile. Agile is defined as the process that works, so if it didn’t work it couldn’t have been agile. If only you read The Agile Manifesto you would understand!

> My favorite Agile-ism is when Agile is defined as “the process that works for the team”. What compels you to believe it isn't? I mean, read the Agile Manifesto. All it does is basically define a set of values and principles. Things like "customer comes first" or "we welcome changes in requirements" or "software must be delivered frequently". What leads you to believe Agile implies a fixed set of precise, rigid rule…

The fact that you spell agile with a capital "A" says all I need to know.

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#93

Post by sadeshmukh »

dijit wrote: post #13

There's an interesting phenomenon that Agile (capital A) has exposed me to, and once I saw it due to Agile I've seen parallels elsewhere. In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough . The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty. It's also true for Cloud providers; that they're not suited for certain…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman seems pertinent here.

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#94

Post by duskdozer »

locknitpicker wrote: post #83
andersmurphy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point! Reminds me of Agentic software development. When it doesn't work out it's only evidence that you could have used more agents. You can never use enough tokens.

> This is a great point! Reminds me of Agentic software development. When it doesn't work out it's only evidence that you could have used more agents. A concept older than agentic software development is bad workmen blaming his tools. I mean, if you can't possibly hammer a nail then is it reasonable to blame the hammer?

If it's an internet-required smarthammer without a handle that instead hits out on voice prompt, sometimes without enough or with too much force, sometimes knocks the nail out of the way and punches a hole, and sometimes hits you in the face, then yeah

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#95

Post by Balinares »

9dev wrote: post #65
endymi0n wrote: post #21

I've come to dread any formalization of Agile. Agile development is fine. I've built a 40+ engineering team with it. I can vouch for its effectiveness when applied to small, excellent teams. For reference, here's all the Agile you need, it's 4 sentences: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding t…

> […] when applied to small, excellent teams. Isn't that the biggest issue here, though? I think all of us can agree on the four sentences you wrote, but this only works in a team of professionals with shared goals (and alignment on them!), each individually competent and motivated. That is the case for a small founder team and maybe a while after that if you're lucky, but IME the more people join a company, the more…

I've had good success in both high-skill teams (in one case, almost half the team's engineers ended up at Google at some point or other) and... teams that were still in the process of skilling up. I've found people generally want to do good things and have some room to grow even if they're not yet at your desired level; and when you have demotivated people around, the causes tend to be systemic. Which, thankfully, implies possibly fixable.

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#96

Post by tux1968 »

t43562 wrote: post #78
tux1968 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that isn't evidence that the method works. If you're a native tribe, that has an ancient traditional rain dance, it is invoked whenever there is a drought. Sometimes it rains shortly after the dance is performed. But if it doesn't rain, it's not proof that you danced poorly, it's evidence that you didn't understand the situation fully or properly. The instructions or "wisdom" you relied on, didn't actually captur…

My evidence is that I was on a team that was not overly controlled by management and had clever people in it without any instant attitudes of rejection so they adapted to it. We produced updates bi-weekly and we had a huge backlog of stupid features which we were never going to get round to - we were able to get the important things done and it was one of the best feelings I've ever had about work. Since then I've be…

What is the chance that you've perfectly captured every aspect of the situation that led to success? Versus, what is the chance that you were lucky enough to be in situations where a multitude of factors, both appreciated and unappreciated, combined to lead to success?

There are a million possible reasons for failure, but here is a very easy one: It doesn't matter how good you feel about the development process, if the company has the wrong objective. You will still end up being frustrated, and failing. Of course this will have all sorts of pathological and uncomfortable ramifications.

So while it is easy to say, "just act this way and you'll have success". You're not actually appreciating all the hidden elements that allow any hope of acting that way. You've been lucky enough to be in situations where it happened to work (ie. the rain dance made rain), but that does not mean it's actually representative, or that the prescription actually captures the critical information needed to ensure success for other people. Instead, you've described a rain dance.

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#97

Post by chrchr »

dijit wrote: post #13

There's an interesting phenomenon that Agile (capital A) has exposed me to, and once I saw it due to Agile I've seen parallels elsewhere. In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough . The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty. It's also true for Cloud providers; that they're not suited for certain…

Yes, but on the other hand, there's https://www.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/, which collects cases of home cooks making inadvisable recipe substitutions and then complaining to the recipe creators that the resulting dish tasted bad. Sometimes there are essential ingredients and skipping them or replacing them with something else makes success impossible.

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#98

Post by ppadev »

dijit wrote: post #13

There's an interesting phenomenon that Agile (capital A) has exposed me to, and once I saw it due to Agile I've seen parallels elsewhere. In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough . The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty. It's also true for Cloud providers; that they're not suited for certain…

reminds me of the impossible fight for when someone forces themselves into a project and prescribes "industry standard" off-the-shelf solutions, to a problem that requires an engineered custom solution.

And when the final product isn't fit for purpose, what do they say when their decision becomes visible?

the off-the-shelf solution is never at fault. It's your execution. You architect your solution wrong. You didn't configure it right. You just didn't adopt it fully enough. The answer is always to dig deeper into the solution and leverage more of its features.

The problem is that the off-the-shelf solution doesn't even have the right feature set needed for the job in the first place.

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#99

Post by rsanheim »

This post sets up a straw man from the outset, and only gets worse from there.

I understand how we got here, where many experienced programmers, managers, and bloggers only know capital-A Agile as the watered down version sold via certifications, crummy medium posts, and atlassian flavored kanban boards. But that isn't agile.

I can’t even with the pitch into spec driven development as some sort of high watermark of software methodology.

Re: Saying goodbye to Agile

#100

Post by bitwize »

DeathArrow wrote: post #5

I wonder if there is no AI product yet which runs scrum ceremonies, assigns user stories in planning and computes story point velocity after the sprint ends.

That's clearly a human's job. The AI's job is to do the programming.
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